... blog post:
In this modern world of constant spin there is a propensity to name things as exactly the opposite of what they actually are, to hide a big lie...
Thus builders name housing developments after what they have destroyed, what was once there but what they have devastated irrecoverably. Hence Badgers Wood - the wood was cut down and badgers dispossessed to make way for the houses, ditto The Warren- where now the bunnies? There again we have Meadows View - the meadows became Phase 2 of the development and so on.
Social media is called social as it is anything but and the name masks a mega hoard of serious and often dangerous anti-social behaviour. Corporates call their executives Leadership Teams to hide the fact they have no leadership skills what-so-ever.
History is constantly rewritten by political pressure groups to their own ends ignoring inconvenient facts that don't fit with their own agendas, thus the defenders of liberty become the oppressors of the free - both labels hiding the reality that there was no liberty nor freedom for anyone in the first place.
Politicians and the PR people who write the spin for the rich and famous are highly adept at this form of deceit or lying as we should really call it, that is the art of naming things the exact opposite of what they are thereby embellishing dubious concepts with fancy words. Thus we get 'This legislation is only temporary' - we've all heard that one before - thus income tax, first temporarily introduced to pay for the Napoleonic war, was reintroduced also 'temporarily' in 1842 to support the introduction of the Free Trade bill and has been with us and indeed the rest of the world ever since.
When politicians bring in legislation to strengthen our freedom of speech then guess what they are trying to gag us even further. When celebrities say they are moving abroad to get away from an intrusive press and unwanted publicity, it only means they want to go somewhere where they can intimidate the press and their PR people can control the spin more effectively in their favour. Thus for example they can then spin the story to accuse someone else of bullying them when they themselves are in fact the bullies.
When it comes to photographic gear, the masters of spin and naming things for exactly what they are not, are the marketing departments of the camera makers. They launch a so called new, innovative, game changing camera, yawn, that turns out to be last years model repackaged with a few tweaks and, this is essential, with a new name attached to it. The thing is, underneath, it isn't new, it isn't innovative and it won't chang any games other than for the manufacturer as there will have been a hefty price hike, They are very good at flogging us the same technology more than once at significantly more money each time, even though we know we have no real need for it. We just can't resist it, as we all have a bit of GAS in us 😄.
So where does this leave us? Sadly in a world where we can't take anything we are told at face value. We must assume that everyone has an agenda and that everything is being spun in support that agenda, until we can independently verify the facts of what we are being told. In the world of 'Social' and the Media this can be very challenging as they have algorithms designed to analyse what we like and feed back to us what they think we want to hear, in support of their advertising revenue streams. In other words it is in their interests to re-enforce the lies. So we need to seek independent sources outside of these two universes which is hard and time consuming.
There is a simpler alternative however; we could turn off all this noise. Switch off Social, disconnect from the Media and live safe in our own little 'world' of our own construction. As they used to say of the late, great Terry Wogan (remember him anyone?) 'no-one got hurt in Wogan World, especially Janet and John', 😂.