Not everything is as it seems

Last week as I was trying to read up on culturtwining around the world, I came across two seemingly unrelated articles that pointed to a similar phenomenon: While we’ve always known that not everything is as it seems, now it is all the more obvious that, indeed, not everything is as it seems.

I don’t know what to do with this reminder! I like being able to depend on hard evidence, on pictures or on video to tell the story. But for the past two weeks I’ve been watching media coverage of the conflict in Syria. It gives the impression that all of Syria’s streets are full of rioting men who are fleeing government mortars. But I know that’s not true. I lived in Syria long enough to know that the neighbourhoods portrayed by the media outlets are few and far between: that while most Syrians may indeed be affected emotionally and by dreadful inflation, most Syrians are waking up and going to school or work or to buy groceries like they always have done.

Similarly, I was in Egypt when the news showed nonstop rioting. Those riots were 500 metres from my hotel, but everything was perfectly calm as I looked out my hotel window. The rioting was real but it was only happening in a few places. The riots were not everything; in fact, half of the rioting I thought I heard as I poked my head out of my window was actually cheering for a football team (which lately has turned into rioting as well, but that’s a topic for another day).

The story is much bigger and broader than what we might be exposed to, and as the stories I will link to below indicate, sometimes everything is actually very different from what it seems.

Israel: The Lie, the Truth and the Meme (of the Soldier and the Girl)… this picture got the blogosphere, the twitterverse, and all the other viralating communities all astir with indignation. Indeed, many of us have grown so accustomed to stories about abuse of Palestinians that we jump on yet another story with boiling blood. But this one took people’s indignation to a whole new level… and turned out to be an utter lie. The whole thing was street theatre and had nothing to do with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict whatsoever!

 

Read the article, though, for some amusing reactions to the revelation that the story was a hoax. Classic!

Then, I came across another article on the same website…

Venezuela: Photos of Armed Children Spark Controversy Online… Another picture gone viral because it evoked indignation. The story here reads as a bit more difficult to interpret. Some really believe that children are being taught to fight at a young age. Others are saying it, too, was a theatrical presentation. Others are saying the guns are toys (personally, I’m not a fan of giving children guns as toys anyway, but we can save that discussion for another day as well). Three interpretations of one photo. How can we know?

Hmmm… Nope! Not everything is as it seems. And we may never know what it really is.

This entry was posted in monday mining links and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink.