True Internet: An Oxymoron

Forget Maths. Forget Mother Tongue. And forget Spelling. 

The toughest subject our children will need to ace today isn’t taught in a classroom or scored by weighted assessments. A flashcard-primed photographic memory won’t help them achieve AL1, and no amount of expensive tuition will save them from this neoteric illiteracy. Because the biggest academic challenge our kids are struggling with today is this: How do they even tell what is real and what is fake on the internet anymore?

I’ve worked in the digital media industry for nearly 20 years, and this is what I’ve learnt: Nothing – and I do mean absolutely nothing – has prepared our children for how muddied the truth has become. By the time they become independent adults, their critical thinking skills would have been blunted by the barrage of middling lies fed to them on a screen. 

Today’s headlines are engineered to lure impressionable young minds in with false promises of important and exciting content. In a sea of hyperbole and clickbaits, of half-truths and fake news, of AI en-dashes, there’s virtually no way for young users to confidently distinguish the factual from the hokum. With the rise of social media and AI-generated content – both jostling for our kids’ eyeballs and dwindling attention span – this problem of internet veracity has only worsened. Navigating the sheer volume of sly equivocation and dramatic exaggeration trafficking on today’s media platforms is like playing a game of god-mode 4D chess on steroids. I can’t even.

Fake news isn’t new news

In journalism school, would-be news reporters are taught a simple barometer of newsworthiness: “Dog bites man” is predictable and mundane; “man bites dog”, on the other, satisfies the sensational and is deemed more deserving of coverage. 

The logic of this proposition is also its problem. If something is rare enough to titillate, it is likely so rare that it never happens at all, making it exceedingly uncommon for anyone to be able to say it actually transpired. Because if it didn’t happen, you can’t claim that it did, right? 

And this is where the internet comes in to say: Watch me… “Man bites dog!”

Content creators will put out just about anything to secure our children’s attention. But this callous disregard of verity is hardly new to us. Once upon a time, there were low-grade media products dedicated to wantonly purveying such faux-news stories. You might recognise them from such frontpage headlines as:

“Taylor Swift cheated with sexy alien – details in Miley Cyrus’ new song!”

Or, “Clooney’s sordid affair with the nanny! (Fran Drescher denies everything!)”

These celebrity gossip rags operated on the principle that if you say something – anything! – with exclamation marks, somebody will buy it (for around $1.50). They catered mainly to a small segment of society ranging from those who were marginally delulu to those who were completely deranged. The rest of us understood how farcical these frontpage assertions were, and we tolerated them like we would an elderly, drunken relative. Asinine, but generally harmless. 

Today’s internet is not the same thing as these weekly tabloids, tucked away in a newsstand corner. It is pervasive and essential, an information superhighway that billions of people depend on daily for news, knowledge and inspirational quotes. And if the internet starts barking “man bites dog” at every turn, how can we expect our children to know the difference between steamy affairs and current affairs?

Hoaxing and coaxing

The blatant falsehoods and extraterrestrial celebrity sex farce are one thing. More disconcerting are the semi-truths skillfully engineered for social media platforms. Perfectly curated social media feeds will have our children believe that all their friends and acquaintances are beautiful, happy and cerebral. Meanwhile, AI-aided creations further blur the line between what’s real and what’s really a portly middle-aged man masquerading as a beauty of K-pop proportions. 

Today’s internet vernacular, designed to insidiously suck in eager young audiences, is making it even harder for them to tell fact from fiction. For example, despite the confident posturing of internet headlines, Gwyneth Paltrow’s dress at the recent Academy Awards ceremony is not “everything”. In fact, it comprises very little of anything, hence the hearty interest in the search term, “Gwyneth Oscar wardrobe malfunction”. 

And her precarious Armani Prive gown also did not, contrary to a multitude of social media captions, “break the internet”. A fashionable outfit – no matter what they would have us believe about the influence that Anna Wintour wields – cannot “break the internet”. The internet is really a massive, complex and incalculable network of devices connected as nodes, as hard to fathom as it is to disrupt. So nothing can actually “break the internet.” (Although Singtel did come quite close.) 

One thing that I will concede, though, is that once you see Gywneth in that threadbare OOTD, “you cannot unsee it.” And not because you’ve expended all your cranial neurons wondering where her underwear is hiding under that apron pretending to be a dress. It’s because your cornea has transmitted a permanent imprint of that image onto your brain and there’s no undo button for it. 

Also true is another oft-used internet phrase. As our gullible kids grow up to be indiscriminately trusting adults, the world’s population will quickly turn dull and unintelligent. In other words, all digital users will have become quite stupid. That’s when the internet would have truly “lost its mind”.