"Our lives have moved towards an image-driven existence where genuine human experience, what actually happened, is obscured by a saturation of false representations and spectacles," notes Rachel Botsman. "We must be able to align around the concrete facts of what happened on the day. There also needs to be a distinction between what has already happened, what will happen, and what might happen." I wish it were as simple as that, as though there were this third strand of 'objective reality' that could ground our agreement in fact. But 'objective reality' crucially depends on social agreement about what counts as evidence, what words we use to describe evidence, and what importance evidence has (or perhaps I sould say, more accurately, society is the result of thise sort of social agreement). From where I sit, we have always lived in different societies, but we haven't even been able to see these other societies; the supposed 'fraying' is these other societies coming into view for the first time, and challenging our view of reality. That's a good thing.
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