The lie comes on horseback and leaves on foot, the truth (trust) travels the opposite way. It comes on foot and leaves on horseback.
And now it's bots who are getting into the game. This has actually been proven in a study at Indiana University in Bloomington . The lie gets automated reinforcements. A systematic study was done on how lies (aka fake news ) spread via Twitter. Clearly, strategies are being used, and sites like infowars.com, breitbart.com, politieka.com and theonion.com play a role in this. Look at Hoaxy , type in a search term and you get a visualized picture of the spreading power of the network. Look at Botometer , and you can see how likely it is that a Twitter account is a bot or not.
The big problem with the truth is that it is always there, but you don't know where, and also not when you will encounter it. Spinvis sings: "The truth is a riddle and it goes like this: it is a good friend, but always too late."
And that brings us to the next technology-sensitive phenomenon.
Take the words 'yesterday' and 'tomorrow'. In NRC of 12 August, Sjoerd de Jong writes that '.. the words 'yesterday' and 'tomorrow' have all but disappeared from NRC copy for almost two years, just as some press agencies avoid them'. This is because in the old world, editions are still used. And in the new world, there are no more editions, it is a flowing edition that has nothing to do with time zones or weekdays. Context-sensitive time indications can be confusing.
There is also other news
Take the information boards of the NS. The very large healthcare email list boards that hung at the large stations in the Netherlands. As the ANWB had already astutely recognized, the NS also discovered that the arrival of the mobile phone is irresistible. No more information boards. But there is good news. On July 18, the NS announced that the large clapper board would return to the stations of Utrecht, The Hague, Rotterdam and Amsterdam. In a new guise, that is.
There you have it. There are concepts that have to succumb to technological violence, but there is also the human being who successfully resists. PostNL had to put back mailboxes, a legal obligation. The NS is putting back the flipcharts, at the massive request of the travelers (aka 'ladies and gentlemen'). Even though all those travelers are walking through the corridors of the station, tweeting, Facebooking and surfing, apparently such a large screen wins over the minuscule screens. Because of the overview.
Man is ultimately stronger than any law or any outdated contract. The letterbox is sent by the law, but man ultimately decides whether he makes it or not. And that braakspoor paragraph, that really goes down.