Analog FM Radio chips in every mobile device? Cell phones, smart phones and app phones? Mandated by Congress? How? Why? When something sounds this stupid, it begs for all of those questions. After all, there doesn’t seem to be a reason for the government to blast the digital mobile device industry back into the Stone Age. Who would think this is a good idea? Who would benefit?

At times like this, I like to quote Deep Throat: “Follow the money.” So let’s do just that.

Radio stations in the United States pay a royalty for the music that they play on the air. It’s known as a public performance royalty and it is mandated by copyright law. The rates are set by a Copyright Royalty Tribunal (See 17 USCS Sects. 801 - 810 for details).

To a layperson, this sounds like a great plan. Radio stations play music to attract an audience. They measure and sell the audience to advertisers. Then, they pay a percentage of their income to Performing Rights Societies such as American Society of Composers, Authors & Publishers (ASCAP), Broadcast Music International (BMI) and SESAC (which used to be the Society of European Stage Authors & Composers, but is now just SESAC) who, in turn, distribute the money to the composers and publishers of the music. Perfect. Right? No, not exactly. There are several parties involved with the production of a song who are not paid under this system including, the musicians, singers and, most importantly for this discussion, the recorded music companies.

As you probably know, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) represents the recorded music companies. Their idea is to charge radio broadcasters a new 1% royalty (roughly $100 million a year industry-wide) and distribute it to the other interested parties in the music industry (namely the recorded music companies).

It may not surprise you to learn that the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) the trade association that represents the radio stations is opposed to this additional royalty.

How opposed? When is the last time someone asked you to write a check for $100 million dollars that you never had to write before? Not only is this a real fight, it has been going on — in one form or another — for quite a while.

Now, if you were the NAB and you really didn’t want to pay the RIAA what would you do? Would you invoke the teachings of Niccolò Machiavelli? Maybe resort to a plot worthy of Franz Kafka? No, no. When you’re in a real fight, the only possible strategy comes from the pen of Mario Puzo speaking through his character Michael Corleone, “My father taught me many things here - he taught me in this room. He taught me - keep your friends close but your enemies closer.” Yep, when in doubt, use The Godfather. It’s simple, it’s direct and it’s just what the NAB is doing.

The NAB reached out to the RIAA and both organizations went to Congress and proposed the inclusion of, let’s say it again: Government mandated FM chips in mobile phones. It’s brilliant! And, it has created a really good fake fight.

To cozy up to the RIAA, and get them to stop looking to the broadcasters for extra royalty money, the NAB partnered with them and made this proposal. It’s the McGuffin. Sure the NAB “believes” that mandated FM chips will be in the interest of public safety. Read Dennis Wharton’s blog post on the official NAB website.

Public safety? Are you kidding me? The vast majority of local radio stations are unmanned and could not possibly respond to any kind of public safety issue. FM radio tuners require antennas and, on a mobile device, that means a headset is required for reception (the antenna is in the headset cord). I’m not going to burn battery life on my phone during a crisis because it is likely to work as a voice device and a txt device and it may be my only hope of real communication. And, not to put too fine a point on it, I was personally less than 20 blocks away from the World Trade Center on 9/11 (I live in NYC) and at no time during the attack was any version of the Emergency Broadcast System used by any broadcaster. TV was working as was cable, Internet, cell service, etc. There were some outages, but the Mayor used 100% of the communications tools available to him to assure New Yorkers, and the rest of the world, that New York had a fully functioning government in place and that our Bravest and Finest were on it. And they were!

I could go on and on with examples where radio failed to inform the public during disasters large and small, man-made and natural, but that would be playing right into the brilliant twist of the NAB’s plan.

Chips in cell phones isn’t about public safety, it’s a call for reinforcements. And it is a strategy worthy of Don Corleone himself.

In a letter to the Chairmen and Ranking Members of both the House and Senate Judiciary Committees dated 20 August 2010, leaders of the mobile phone, wireless and consumer electronics industry associations said what the NAB wanted. “It is simply wrong for two entrenched industries to resolve their differences by agreeing to burden a third industry - which has no relationship to or other interest in the performance royalty dispute - with a costly, ill-considered, and unnecessary new mandate.”

Now, it’s seven to one. The NAB with the enlisted help of the CTIA-The Wireless Association, the Telecommunications Industry Association, TechAmerica, the Consumer Electronics Association, the Information Technology Industry Council and the Rural Cellular Association against the RIAA.

Mandated analog FM chips in cell phones is a really, really bad idea. Everyone knows it. And with all of the lobbying firepower lined up against it, it has very little chance of actually happening. In the end, I am truly impressed by the NAB’s use of misdirection and prestidigitation. How to get others to kick your enemy’s butt? Kudos guys, way to save a $100 mil a year!

Shelly Palmer is the host of "Digital Life with Shelly Palmer," a weekly half-hour television show about living and working in a digital world which can be seen on WNBC-TV’s NY Nonstop. He is Managing Director of Advanced Media Ventures Group, LLC an industry-leading advisory and business development firm and the President of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, NY (the organization that bestows the coveted Emmy® Awards). Mr. Palmer is the author of Television Disrupted: The Transition from Network to Networked TV (2008, York House Press) and the upcoming, Get Digital: Reinventing Yourself and Your Career for the 21st Century Economy (2010, Lake House Press). You can join the MediaBytes mailing list here. Shelly can be reached at shelly@palmer.net For information visit www.shellypalmer.com

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been discussing the concepts and constructs of Truth (with a capital “T”), truth (with a lower case “t”), truthiness (as coined by Stephen Colbert), reality, wikiality (also coined by Stephen Colbert) and facts as they apply to our connected world. You can read part one by clicking here, part two by clicking here and part three by clicking here.

Last week we looked at trust circles, truth clusters and the way information travels. We tried to map Truth, truth and facts as narrative traveled through our connected world. In this final installment of this series, we will look at message management and explore the techniques that may help us temper truthiness in our connected world.

It is axiomatic that trust circles, our smallest most inner circles of trusted sources, have always existed. Information Age technology empowers us to overlap all of our trust circles (the one for consumer electronics, the one for religious studies, the one for political guidance, the one for stamp collecting, etc.) and see the results collected in one place. Facebook is a good example. Every one of your Facebook friends is not in every one of your trust circles. They may not be in any, or they may be in a few. Sometimes they are clearly defined by Facebook groups or guests attending a particular event. Other times, they are simply people who you group together when you are thinking about a specific topic. You assemble your trust circle(s) and you are assembled into the trust circles of others.

By definition, trust circles are private. We now know that you can’t “bark” or interrupt your way into a trust circle, you have to be invited in or earn your way in. How you do this is the essence of modern social media marketing. (You can retain my company if you need help with this, it’s one of the things we do best!)

Trust circles are the last bit of conscious control any of us have over the contextualized, editorialized transference of information (raw data) into knowledge. As a story propagates through our connected world, truth clusters self-assemble. This too, is exactly what happens in the offline world.

As we can see every day, super clusters self-assemble around the most compelling narratives. We can track truthiness along the line of best fit (to use a mathematical metaphor) and we can also intuit that super clusters have offline counterparts because we experience them everywhere.

While the structure of human communication (beginning, middle and ending; rising action, climax, falling action) hasn’t changed very much over the past 3,500 years, there are two remarkable, non-trivial attributes of narrative today. 1) The most compelling narrative (true or false) cannot be erased from the searchable body of knowledge and, 2) the technology propagates the most compelling narrative (true or false) at speeds that are almost beyond the threshold of our ability to react.

That being said, there is an argument to be made that, although the technology makes us faster communicators, it does not make us better communicators. We know this because bad ideas travel just as quickly as good ideas. Facts and truthiness travel equally fast. So, it is logical to assume that since good and bad, true and false, right and wrong all travel at the same speed we should take it out of our thought experiment. But we can’t. Speed is, as we will soon see, a huge factor.

That leaves us the indelible attributes of the world wide web and wikiality to deal with.

If a crowd-sourced wikiality is the most compelling narrative, but it is not verifiable or fact-based, does it become the truth? And if it does, what should we do about it? The answer is, nothing. There is a single word that describes a crowd-sourced, compelling narrative that is not verifiable or fact-based … “faith.” We do not have any tools, electronic or otherwise, that will reliably, effectively inspire or incentivize people to question their faith. There’s no reason to try.

Which leaves us with the only possible tools we can use in the information age to help us propagate Facts and Truth … filters. Thinking this through and listening to hundreds of learned colleagues tell me stories about truthiness and wikiality, it occurs to me that clear, concise, branded filters are probably the best defense.

Sadly, actual Facts and Truth are the victims of the information age because filters craft narrative and tend to blanket us in the comfort of the information we want to hear. Fox News vs. MSNBC. Which is truthier to you? Man-made Global Warming vs. Natural Climate Cycles. Which is the more compelling wikiality? Life begins at conception or A woman’s right to choose. What does your faith tell you? I could go on forever. But each super cluster believes what it wants to believe, so we don’t need to worry about changing minds, we simply need to brand our filters along the lines of best fit.

To aggregate the largest audience and keep it, apply the branded filter that matches the most compelling narrative. Wait … that’s what TV programmers do. Yep, that’s what they’ve always done. Is it the “boob tube” or is it “programming to the lowest common denominator?” As we all know, popularity has never been a measure of quality and quality has certainly never been a measure of popularity.

My sons, Brent (21) and Jared (19) both took exception to my idea that social media would empower ordinary people to do extraordinary things. It was their collected contention that I was enamored with the technology that I failed to see that all of the ambient social media noise was self-canceling. The math, they argued, was simple. I’m pretty sure they are right.

It is interesting that this week, Freedom of Religion, is front and center in the national news. It made me think back to the conditions surrounding the birth of our nation. It occurred to me that, the idea that America needed to be independent from Great Brittan was so powerful that it persuaded people, who would describe themselves as British citizens, to pick up weapons and commit treason.

America, the brand, was a powerful idea. But treason was a serious crime. Then as now, anonymity was an appropriate tool. Under the nom de plume “Written by an Englishman,” Thomas Paine anonymously published Common Sense in January 1776. It was an instant best seller. When adjusted for population, it may be the best-selling document in American History. Historian Gordon S. Wood described Common Sense as, “the most incendiary and popular pamphlet of the entire revolutionary era.” Common Sense was just a pamphlet, written in the style of a sermon. Would Information Age technology have done a better job changing the minds of British Loyalists? Doubtful.

History, as we well know, is written by the winner. In our time, the Truth (note the capital “T”) will be determined by the truth (note the small “t”) that makes the greatest number of indelible copies of itself. This is not new and apparently, the transformation of reality to wikiality is not new either. What is new is simply the speed at which all of this is happening. We need tools to interact with information traveling at this speed. And, we need better filters to help us sort out and curate the data that is most important to us.

Is there a way to save Facts and Truth in the Information Age? It’s easy to predict the evolution of tools that will empower users to find root threads of ideas that are propagating online in near real time. As hand messenger services gave way to faxes, and faxes gave way to email, and email gave way to txt messaging — we will find a way to adapt to the new speed of information — after all, it is directly equated to economic success.

Shelly Palmer is the host of "Digital Life with Shelly Palmer," a weekly half-hour television show about living and working in a digital world which can be seen on WNBC-TV’s NY Nonstop. He is Managing Director of Advanced Media Ventures Group, LLC an industry-leading advisory and business development firm and the President of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, NY (the organization that bestows the coveted Emmy® Awards). Mr. Palmer is the author of Television Disrupted: The Transition from Network to Networked TV (2008, York House Press) and the upcoming, Get Digital: Reinventing Yourself and Your Career for the 21st Century Economy (2010, Lake House Press). You can join the MediaBytes mailing list here. Shelly can be reached at shelly@palmer.net For information visit www.shellypalmer.com

By Shelly Palmer and Jared Palmer -

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been discussing the concepts and constructs of Truth (with a capital “T”), truth (with a lower case “t”), truthiness (as coined by Stephen Colbert), reality, wikiality (also coined by Stephen Colbert) and facts as they apply to our connected world. You can read part one by clicking here and part two by clicking here.

It’s time to look at trust circles, truth clusters and the way information travels. We’ll try to map Truth, truth and facts, and think about ways to navigate the body of knowledge as we continue to explore truthiness in our connected world.

In part two, I highlighted a story in the New York Post about the John Concepcion case. The Post reported that Concepcion (a convicted murderer who had damaged his own liver by attempting suicide) had somehow made it to the top of the transplant list ahead of seemingly more deserving people, and been given a liver transplant.

If you remember, I had a Socratic debate with Judge Jeanine Pirro in the make-up room at Fox 5 about how this happened and what could be done about it. We had a lively discussion. Both of us retained our point of view, no minds were changed and the facts of the case were never in dispute. Sadly, this story was not a Truth, truth nor fact. On July 28th, 2010, the Post corrected itself, saying that they could not actually verify that the transplant took place. The correction was made in a tiny 2×3 box on the inside flap. (Author’s note: I read the paper version of the New York Post almost every morning, it is one of my guilty pleasures. It is not my intention to beat them up over a mistake. This particular incident just happens to work perfectly for our truthiness thesis.)

This week I also ran into Judge Jeanine Pirro in the make-up room just before our respective segments on Fox 5. We chatted about stuff and then I asked her if she saw that I mentioned her in last week’s piece. Remarkably, Her Honor had not seen the Post’s retraction and she did not know that Mr. Concepcion had not received a liver transplant.

The facts didn’t change Jeanine’s opinion about how the hypothetical situation should have been handled, but it did render our discussion moot. Now, Jeanine Pirro is very smart, and she had no trouble adjusting her worldview to incorporate the new evidence. But, there are hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people who did not see the Post’s retraction. And they are still operating under the assumption that John Concepcion received a liver ahead of other, possibly more deserving, people.

I’d like to examine how this information traveled around the InterWeb, but first, we need some definitions. Let’s define a “trust circle” as our immediate, must trusted sources (friends, relatives, colleagues, thought leaders). Our test being that we would trust their opinion over Brian Williams’. (You can use your own benchmark for trust, we trust Brian!!!) Let’s define a “truth cluster” as a group of trust circles with similar beliefs. And, just for fun, let’s imagine a “super cluster” as a group of truth clusters.

Although this story was initiated in print by a New York Post credentialed journalist — within a remarkably short time, it was broadcast in the local market using both radio and television. While it was not known to be true, the Post’s standards and practices allowed it to print the story as fact. And, due to the sensationalist nature of the story, emotions on both sides of the issue instantly came into play. Significantly faster than the story was translated from print to broadcast media, it put the InterWeb in OverTweet. There were dozens of blog posts, tweets, status updates, comments, emails, smoke signals, and carrier pigeons flying all over the place telling all kinds of stories about this story.

There were no facts, just the “truth” with a small “t” printed in the New York Post. However, this truth became a Truth, with a capital “T” to some and was assumed to be a fact by others. The idea that a convicted murderer who damaged his own liver while trying to commit suicide was somehow put on the top of the liver transplant list, made people’s blood boil. Trust circles embraced the idea and a huge super cluster of complete misinformation appeared within hours.

In a physical explosion, the energy would have dissipated by now. And so it did with this story. It’s no longer in the news cycle, practically forgotten by all. Except, the misinformation can never be unpublished and the rhetoric can never be unsaid — it is all part of the body of knowledge of the InterWeb, the blogosphere, the tweetosphere, Facebookistan, etc.

We have all seen this kind of behavior before. It’s not new. People make mistakes or simply lie all the time. Storytelling is an art form and there is always plenty of artistic license taken no matter who is telling the story. However, this is the first time in history that we have seen trust circles empowered by instantly scalable technologies. In the next and final installment of this series we will look at message management in the information age and explore the techniques that may help us find truthiness in our connected world.

Shelly Palmer is the host of "Digital Life with Shelly Palmer," a weekly half-hour television show about living and working in a digital world which can be seen on WNBC-TV’s NY Nonstop. He is Managing Director of Advanced Media Ventures Group, LLC an industry-leading advisory and business development firm and the President of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, NY (the organization that bestows the coveted Emmy® Awards). Mr. Palmer is the author of Television Disrupted: The Transition from Network to Networked TV (2008, York House Press) and the upcoming, Get Digital: Reinventing Yourself and Your Career for the 21st Century Economy (2010, Lake House Press). You can join the MediaBytes mailing list here. Shelly can be reached at shelly@palmer.net For information visit www.shellypalmer.com

By Shelly Palmer and Jared Palmer -

Last week, we started to explore the concepts and constructs of Truth (with a capital “T”), truth (with a lower case “t”), truthiness (as coined by Stephen Colbert), reality, wikiality (also coined by Stephen Colbert) and facts as they apply to our connected world. You can read the first installment of this series by clicking here.

Let’s pick it up where we left off, “What happens when the truth is not the most compelling narrative?”

On July 19th 2010, a video was posted by Andrew Breitbart to his website, showing video of Shirley Sherrod, the Georgia State Director of Rural Development for the USDA, that showed her making seemingly racist statements at an NAACP event back in March. Foxnews.com was first to report the story that had now splashed through the blogosphere. Later that afternoon Sherrod was asked to resign via email after a call from USDA deputy undersecretary Cheryl Cook. That evening, NAACP President Benjamin Jealous condemned Sherrod, tweeted that he was “appalled” by Sherrod’s actions.

Fact: Sherrod’s comments were taken out of context. The full video of the speech, which the NAACP possessed throughout this whole ordeal, reveals Sherrod discussing how she overcame her racism after struggling with it for years since her father’s murder.

In this case, the initial wikiality was wrong, as were the factoids and narratives given by the news networks as it unfolded. We now know the facts and we can only hope that the facts get out about Sherrod’s ordeal. They will, but not to everyone. There will be a fairly large number of people who accept wikiality over reality, after the facts have been revealed. Let’s call this residual wikiality. The idea that Sherrod is a racist will continue to be their wikiality because 1) it’s the most compelling narrative 2) ignorance, or 3) lack of effort on their part to continue to follow the story.

Residual wikiality is not new, it has been a fact-of-life since the dawn of communication. However, in our connected world, those who choose wikiality over reality have two technological tools their predecessors lacked: connected devices that can propagate their wikiality at scale, and an uneraseable, permanent online record of their wikiality.

Another recent example takes wikiality to a slightly different place and helps us explore the role of compelling narrative in a less politically-charged arena.

This was on the cover the New York Post on July 26th 2010. Besides A-Rod’s frown, it’s the beginning of an article on the JohnConcepcion case. The Post reported that Concepcion (a convicted murderer who had damaged his own liver by attempting suicide) had somehow made it to the top of the transplant list ahead of seemingly more deserving people, and been given a liver transplant.

People went crazy with this story. I had a Socratic debate with Judge Jeanine Pirro in the make-up room at Fox 5 about how this happened and what could be done about it. She thought the law should be changed to prevent this from ever happening again and she wanted to find out how it happened in the first place! Our debate was over how, in practice, you could have two systems determining punishment: one legal and one medical. She thought it was easy to do, I was not sanguine with the idea of a committee of medical experts using anything but medical criterion in their decision-making process.

But, this story was not a Truth, truth nor fact. On July 28th, 2010, the Post corrected itself, saying that they could not actually verify that the transplant took place. But how was this correction made? It didn’t make the cover. But rather, it was a tiny 2×3 box on the inside flap.

Thus the wikiality of the matter was not and has not been realigned to reality. Can it ever be? No, once a wikiality has been formed, the only way to combat it is with an equal yet opposite wikiality. Sadly, it is almost impossible to create one. As it has been throughout history, the first story, the first headline, the first byte is the one that’s going to stick. Again, this would not be news except that in a connected world filled with webpages of misinformation and personal truths, nothing can be unsaid and nothing can be unpublished.

Next week, we will look at trust circles, truth clusters and the way information travels. We’ll try to map Truth, truth and facts, and think about ways to navigate the body of knowledge as we continue to explore truthiness in our connected world.

Shelly Palmer is the host of "Digital Life with Shelly Palmer," a weekly half-hour television show about living and working in a digital world which can be seen on WNBC-TV’s NY Nonstop. He is Managing Director of Advanced Media Ventures Group, LLC an industry-leading advisory and business development firm and the President of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, NY (the organization that bestows the coveted Emmy® Awards). Mr. Palmer is the author of Television Disrupted: The Transition from Network to Networked TV (2008, York House Press) and the upcoming, Get Digital: Reinventing Yourself and Your Career for the 21st Century Economy (2010, Lake House Press). You can join the MediaBytes mailing list here. Shelly can be reached at shelly@palmer.net For information visit www.shellypalmer.com

By Shelly Palmer and Jared Palmer -

Over the next few weeks we are going to explore the concepts and constructs of Truth (with a capital “T”), truth (with a lower case “t”), truthiness (as coined by Stephen Colbert), reality, wikiality (also coined by Stephen Colbert) and facts as they apply to our connected world.

What is True? (I don’t really want to delve into the metaphysical or philosophical nature of truth. I’m simply trying to help us define and label a baseline.) Are facts true? By definition, they are. Barack Obama won the presidential election and is, at this writing, the President of the United States. This is a fact. By definition, it is true.

I have a new favorite quote (that I truly overuse) by the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan “… you are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.” We can all agree that facts are true, can’t we? No, we can’t. Here’s an experiment my son (and co-author) Jared devised to test the practical existence of fact.

Objective: Explore the way facts, truth, and narrative affect crowds and groups. Observe the relationship between fact, truth, and narrative and apply the findings to the future of social networking, news, and mass media.

Apparatus: A ball is dropped off a table. The ball has a special coloration and pattern such that people who are colorblind see it as a distinctly different color than people who aren’t colorblind. After having the subjects view the event, they will be asked to describe it.

Hypothesis: Everyone will agree on the fact that the ball dropped. We will call this a “supercluster.” The colorblind individuals will say that the ball was one color, the non-colorblind people will say that the ball was another color. There will also be at least two distinct “truth clusters,” those who are colorblind and those who are not color blind.

My son spends a little too much time in his college physics lab, but I like the physics metaphors we are using here because information seems to travel in particles and waves, just like energy. Here’s how 20th century physics might help you think about the 21st century information problem we’re discussing.

What is true in the 21st century? With a little bit of help from Einstein’s relativity, we know that 1. There is no way to distinguish between reference frames and that 2. The laws of physics hold true in all reference frames.

In one of Einstein’s famous gedanken (thought) experiments he showed that simultaneity is relative to the observer. Although relativistic effects such as time dilation and length contraction can’t be seen day to day, there are some important implications of Einstein’s postulates. No two people observe the same event the same way, and both observers are correct though the numerical values of physical observations may differ. If that’s the case, then what actually happens? Who is right and who is wrong? Who can be trusted?

Examples:

Barack Obama is the president of the United States of America.
North Carolina is closer to the North Pole than South Carolina.
There was a ball in the aforementioned experiment that hit the floor.

A Truth, according to m-w.com, is “the state of being the case; the body of real things, events, and facts. A judgment, proposition, or idea that is true or accepted as true; the property (as of a statement) of being in accord with fact or reality”

Examples:

The ball was blue.
The ball was red.
The ball was painted such that colorblind people thought it was a different color than those who saw it who were not colorblind.

What happens when the colorblind observers find out that the ball appeared a different color to non-colorblind observers? A certain number of them will adjust their facts. Will all of them? Should they?

Truth, Narrative Authority, Reality and Wikiality

Stephen Colbert coined the term “truthiness.” I like it! This idea will become surprisingly important in the future as the source of news becomes more important. Here’s the dilemma:

1. A left-wing cable news show reports some aspects of a physical event.

2. A right-wing cable news show reports other aspects of the same physical event.

3. My friend on Twitter, who claims to have been a witness, reports other aspects.

4. My friend on Facebook, reports some mixture, without any qualifying statements.

5. Another friend on Facebook or Twitter, writes an opinionated statement about the event.

So, what actually happened? What is fact and what is narrative? Who has more truthiness? What is the reality? What is the Wikiality? Are these the same? Which source should I trust? Who has the narrative authority?

The way to solve this problem is to filter and give weight to each source. Marshall McLuhan said, “the medium is the message,” but in the 21st century we say, “the median is the message.” If you are going to report the news, then you are going to have to be able to make the distinction between fact and fiction, truth and narrative, reality and wikiality. The median, the measure of the central tendency, will become the accepted truth — along the same lines as political philosopher John Stuart Mill’s idea of the tyranny of the majority. Stephen Colbert coined this idea as “Wikiality.” Urbandictionary.com defines it as: “a reality as determined by general consensus rather than cold hard facts. If enough people say it is true, then it is true.” J.S. Mill noted that the majority isn’t always right, it just so happens to be the most accepted. If we think about each physical event as a single data point, then the lines we draw to connect these lines can be thought of as the narrative. Think about giving meaning to random events as the equivalent of statistical curve fitting.

The accepted narrative will either be the most compelling to us, or the one that is closest to the Truth. Maybe the best narrative doesn’t even connect all the lines, perhaps it is merely a line of best fit. Regardless of its shape, adding narrative comforts us because it lets us piece together random events — giving life a seeming progression and meaning and the ability to cope with nihilism.

Under these circumstances, it makes sense that the key to narrative authority and Truth dominance is to tap into this narrative addiction and give the consumer/user/audience the most truthful data points or the most compelling narrative.

But what happens when the truth is not the most compelling narrative?

To be continued.