Exposed Viral Hoaxes Prove How Easy it is to Dupe the World with DisinfoBy Buck Rogers In 1999, Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris conducted a study on the phenomenon of inattentional blindness, subsequently publishing a video which dramatically supports their finding that it is remarkably easy for people to miss details in visual information simply because one is not looking for them.Their research was presented as a test for the public in a video released in 2010. Try itfor yourself. Just count how many times the players in white pass the ball. Did you catch that the first time? The criticalpointhere is that the mind is naturally drawn to whatever it is that our attention is directed towards. We are easily fooled in this way. We inherently ignore details, even gross details, when we are prompted to take something at face value. We live in a time of unprecedented media trickery and digital propaganda. Couple this with the availability of affordable personal computers and software that can create videos of extremely convincing and believable visual quality, and you have the perfect conditions for the rise of disinfo. You no longerneed well-funded agencies like the Pentagon to spend hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to have effective propaganda produced to support and advance an agenda, whether it be political, corporate or personal. For anyone can fool the masses from their bedroom studios. In the early 1900s, French philosopherJacques Ellul described propaganda. This was in at a time when the world just beginning to step into the age of mass propaganda. Propaganda is the manipulation of the subconscious by technical meansOur technical world not only creates these feelings spontaneously, it develops them with malice aforethought for technical reasons and by technical means which, in their action on the human being, reinforce the structures of that technical world. ~ Jacques Ellul Technology has in fact become so sophisticated now, that media producers are able to achieve extraordinary effects that make disinfo more effective than ever. Consider the following examples. To punctuate the effectiveness of modern, easy-to-produce propaganda, the recent exposure of a number of viral video hoaxes gives us even morereason to think twice when consuming information in the Internet age. Over the last few years, an Australian media production company, Screen Australia,duped the world with a number ofproductions which were actually digitized hoaxes, revealing their secret only after the fact that media outlets around the world had featured them in news reels as being authentic. Take a look for yourself, as described byRT. This video of a man speaking some sort of gibberish after his girlfriend was, supposedly, almost struck by lightning proved the most popular of the fake viral videos, reaching almost 60 million views, according to its creators. The full video: While many correctly outed this video as fake that didnt stop it clocking up views. The video has more than 34 million views. The full video: Uploaded a year later on the same YouTube channel as the great white shark standoff, this dramatized video of tourists in a battle of the selfie sticks was watched in total more than 21 million times according to The Woolshed Co. figures. The full video: This clip of a Rihanna singing snowboarder oblivious that there was a bear behind her was uploaded just a few months ago, and quickly went viral, getting news coverage across the world. The mind is frightfully easy to deceive, and as the propaganda machine kicks into overdrive in a push for World War III, we must be aware of how easy for illusions to be passed off as real in our world. The media, especially the corporate media, is determined to hammer us with the most sensational, click-generating content it can, often disregarding the imperative to pursue truth in a time of universal deceit. Read more articles byBuck Rogers. Buck Rogersis the earth-bound incarnation of that familiar part of our timeless cosmic selves, the rebel within. He is a surfer of ideals and meditates often on the promise of happiness in a world battered by the angry seas of human thoughtlessness. He is a staff writer forWakingTimes.com. Like Waking Times on Facebook. Follow Waking Times on Twitter. ~~ Help Waking Times to raise the vibration by sharing this article with friends and family The idea is that its easy to dupe the general public? Americans are particularly vulnerable because they have been spoiled with a worry free life for three generations. Theyve lost their innate sense of self-preservation because their security is not at risk. So, we tend to trust our politicians and used to believe that they were trying to the best thing for the citizens, the voters. You couldnt fool Romanians or Hungarians like the Americans can be fooled. The Germans, French, English are like the Americans. They are asleep at the switch and have just had their cultures and countries overrun with soldiers from muslim countries. All those males between 18 and 40 are not immigrants, theyre an invading army . . .literally. Trust nothing from the great boob tube. Heres the mantra for truth in the future. If you didnt see it with your own two eyes, it didnt happen. Pure and simple. Even if it did happen and you didnt see it, it as relevant to your life as a Sequoya falling in the California forest. Its irrelevant and should be treated as such. Just ignore any news that doesnt affect you and the world will get back to minding its own damn business, avoiding all kinds of nonsensical made-up wars and conflicts over offended ideologies where the evidence of such offenses are manufactured fakes and the perpetrators mere ghosts. The heartening part is the nature of the Internets is such that there is a self correcting mechanism by which hoaxes are rapidly exposed, through the technology expertise of digital experts. Most hoaxes begin to be exposed because something feels fake about a scene. Even in the best of animation sequences, such as the bear attack scene in DiCapprios Revenant, I immediately sensed something unnatural about the scene. These are the best animators in the world. Nothing can perfectly imitate nature. 