CCT300+LAB+9

Lab #9 Juan Camilo Diez Truthiness is just a word, yet it feels wrong to say or to use in a sentence. I have never used this word and I just read about it today for the first time. However, the word truthiness has been around for a few years now, in fact, the American Dialect Society (A.D.S selected ‘truthiness’ in 2005 as the Word of the Year (nytimes). Truthiness’ true origin is not sure, what can be sure its that after Colbert used it in his show “the Colbert Report” the word gain superstar status. This phenomenon can be related to Marshall McLuhan “the medium is the message” (McLuhan); though the word had meaning it wasn’t until the medium of Television and ‘Colbert Report’ actually turned the word into a message that could be understood by viewers. After the airing of the show many other spoofs came to be of other words thanks to the understanding of truthiness, one of the most interesting ones thus far being a group of software engineers hired to design software to detect the propagation of political misinformation on Twitter (nytimes). This group of designers called the software ‘Tuthy’ (nytimes). Works Cited McLuhan, Marshall. "Marshall McLuhan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia." //Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia//. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 Nov. 2010. . Zimmer, Ben. "On Language - Truthiness - NYTimes.com." //The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia//. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 Nov. 2010. .