29 October 2009

Through the Hue of Your You-Colored Lens

Disinformation: A brand of information, not necessarily false, but rather misleading, misplaced, irrelevant, incomplete or superficial. It creates an illusion of knowing something while it actually leads one away from knowing.

When you think about it, information is fairly subjective these days. Every news source and every blog has a different perspective and you get to decide which source you're going to listen to. Even when you venture to read a story from a different source than your usual, its conflicting point of view forces you to make up your mind about if what you're reading is true, or at the very least consciously re-balance its terminology against its background politics. As our world becomes saturated with information, a battle for your trust in intellectual authority has begun. What's most disturbing is that truth is not important anymore. Instead, the vendors of our information's context use other appeal to help you digest their branded message. This all happens completely apart from reality. This is the age of the Internet.

You too can have your opinions heard on this network of nearly infinite reach. With not even a certification to your name, you can reach out to thousands of people. High tide has come and the flood of democratic Internet participation has begun crashing through the levies and sandbag walls. And as the waters of free, unencumbered speech carry us into the streets where only experts once walked, we pierce the air with our rallying cry: Democracy to information! We extol our wisdom, adding that we are not professionals, but we did stay at a Holiday Inn Express the previous night.

The masses now control the truth. It is said that he who wins the war writes the book, but the war is just a matter of which web address you type into your browser. With democratized content, users decide what gets seen and what gets buried; what gets shared and what gets ignored. Depending on what site you visit, you get a different story. Entire representations of opinions can simply starve to death on social news sites, which give their users the power to make dissenting points of view vanish from consideration with a single click. The result is myopic tunnel vision, the perpetuation of unchecked conviction, and a cage match between back-patting and debate. In by the good graces of the predictable social media public, all information associated with a favorite subject is on the fast track to recognition with little check for sincerity or validity. The information is not the goal; your attention is.

In 2003, FOX News argued in court for its first amendment right to report lies and misinformation. It won. Corporate news entertainment has disenchanted us and driven us into the arms of independent, unchecked and volatile quasi-information pumped out in droves by blogs across the expanse of social media. This stupidity can result in a loss of $4 billion off one corporation’s market cap because of an unchecked newsletter commenting on a bogus internal missive. It can also contribute to the loss of a primary election due to unverified claims of party infidelity. When the mission is to be the first to break a story rather than be accurate, mistakes made by the forerunners are perpetuated by the stragglers and nobody apologizes.

Is this where the future is headed? News that was designed to be shouted back at? Go on, give your opinion, they'll run a supplemental piece on it. This all isn't to say that news has ever been exactly what we want it to be, but there does not seem to be any noticeable movement in the right direction. At the moment, we are reveling in the sound of our collected voice. We are patting ourselves on the back, acknowledging the freedom of expression, unburdened by the presence of the truth. We would like to believe that we are champions of revolution, but we're not changing anything. Rather, we are clearing more ground for the battle of ideologies to rage on.
Posted by Andrew Gonsalves at 8:19 PM
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9 nibbles:

  1. 'The truth is not important any more' -- When was the truth ever important..? It's always been subjective. The history books are written by the winners of the wars.

    How much 'truth' do you really think there is in our knowledge of the Romans? The ONLY accounts we have of the Roman empire come from a tiny handful of scholars. The rest is guess work, piecing together fragments of other accounts, fossils, church records, etc.

    This sounds a lot like my blog entry recently on authority: http://blog.mrseb.co.uk/2009/08/knowledge-is-power-dont-dis-what-you-dont-know/ -- I did a series of posts on knowledge/authority -- but yes, we both agree that intellectual authority has now departed.

    But that's a two-way thing: no longer are we 'forced' to believe old-school authorities like the Church. Now we get to choose who we believe... Fox... or the BBC...
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  2. Seb: The purpose of the post was simply to draw a line back from where we came from to where we are, to chart a vector, to see where we're headed. I noted that he who wins the war writes the book. It does seem that things used to be a lot more objective than they are today. Still, it doesn't mean that there is no room for more truth anymore. It'll just take a good idea and a lot of support from all sides.
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  3. Yes... but when was there space for 'truth'?

    Science is a really, really recent thing you know. Until the last couple of hundred years, it really wasn't a big thing -- and you often got persecuted for having wild, outlandish truths.

    It's always been about having a good idea, some charisma and lots of support.

    Obviously, the truth will out eventually, because it's hard to ignore it forever -- though purely-social fallacies might never be corrected.

    Fortunately the papers can print stories about the world being flat, but it doesn't actually _make_ it flat. Phew.
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  4. Ha, ha, what's wrong with a flat world? ;-)

    I would challenge the notion that things used to a lot more objective than they are today. I see no evidence of that and might just as easily have concluded the contrary and it seems to me very classic "good old days" reminiscing. The familiar old space has changed and "back then" the purveyors of news were more objective than today.

    I'll park that until someone has more than a "seems" kind of gut feel around it and some objective data themselves. It certainly seems to me, that more voices are visible, yes, but I'm far from convinced about the impact of them yet, or that, by bringing a lot of opinionated talk into the public realm (which once remained and still resides firmly, at the dinner table and in the bar) actually says anything more than that, that it's in the public realm.

    I often find myself at a dinner party for example where the wont to talk far outstrips the depth of information available and I'm surrounded by people yabbering away politely in a realm of pure speculation and opinion, it's asocial phenomenon which has little to do with facts or truth and a lot to do with intercourse and interaction. It gets alarming when people walk away form it with conclusions ;-).

    You remind me of the self congratulatory arrogance that some pundits of science carry with them to such discussions, because they are well read and "know" things. In reality I can always trace their "know"ing back to "read it somewhere", explore the somewhere and in the best cases it's a reputable source, and I can still help them to see they don't therefore "know" this at all, they are uttering a simple statement of faith in the source, the methods and people behind that source and so on. And that may well be well placed faith (certainly if it is placed upon peer-reviewed scientific journals or reputable summaries like The New Scientist say, I'd say your faith was well placed).

    The emergent skill I think that accompanies more diverse public discourse is understanding the source and distinguishing probable facts from likely opinions. And in the marketing game the emergent drive is sell that kind of confidence and assurance in the quality of the source. As such information becomes branded ... and we lay our faith in certain brands.

    Your blog is a brand for example. And as a reader I'll grant it a certain spot in my assessment of probable fact vs. likely opinion. They are usually easy to separate, and the gray zone is small.
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  5. I want to be friends with Bernd...!

    Email me: mrsebastian@gmail.com
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  6. Thanks for adding your sub-blog to my blog. It should be noted that this post is not without a dose of self-realized irony. I suppose you'd have to know me better to pick up on it. My opinion doesn't matter so much as the awareness to the situation is. Even if you disagree with me, you're thinking about the concept, which is my only goal.
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  7. I like that. Sub-blog ;-). Nice. I wonder if it has much currency in this context. If it were a blog I'd have proof read it and remove most of the typos I see in it now, but yes, I can type fast, think fast, talk fast and am easily distracted by interesting things ... of which Don't Feed The Animals is one I stumbled on recently thanks to a friends facebook post.

    One of the things that keeps me sub-blogging rather than blogging, is in fact time. If I had a blog it'd be pretty dead and quite for long stretches then burst into life once in a while and I stall at the huge list of things I promised myself to write some time ... sub-blogging is charmingly reactive and independent of my to do list because I'm taking a stress break, you have the spark and I just type a little polemic to it perhaps.

    This too is an interesting area the evolution of which I've seen musd over since the mid '90s when I say Bertelsmann(a huge publishing concern) deliver a speculative talk in Berlin regarding how media, information and branding will evolve. Interesting much of the blogging revolution in its broad sense was predicted but many of the specifics too have been surprising and there is much evolution underway.

    For my part I see the evolution thus far as positive for the very reasons you state Andrew, more and more people are thinking about it. As they perforce must with the flood of possible information sources at their fingertips now (than you Mr. Google ;-). And as they think about it, they are more likely (and increasingly as a broadening social phenomenon) to understand that knowledge is beyond their cost effective grasp and all they have left is faith in particular sources of information.

    I for example lay a lot of faith in the New Scientist magazine. Some lay a lot of faith in the Bible, some in the New York Times, some in Reuters, some in Don't Feed The Animals etc. but the comforting thing is the slow emergence(I suspect) of an awareness that faith is all we have in most fields bar perhaps those we are researching intimately ourselves (and I mean primary research, as in poke this and see what happens, mix that see what happens, watch people, see what happens - and learn a little about probability and statistics before projecting from those observations to social generalities etc. Most of us will do precious little of these things, we basically read about other people who do ... and then we form views, and they are based upon faith in the sources.

    Sebastian: I updated my profile a little, if you want to get in touch. In spite of what seems like generous verbalage here, I'm not all that pumped up on free time (recently distracting myself between rather challenging jobs, i.e. indulging in a few more tea breaks than usual ;-). What time I have for such abstract interests wanders a lot of time ...
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  8. While I agree that without hands-on experience, all we have is faith in the storyteller, I would also say that even the most experienced scientist can see things wrongly. In my current studies into sexual biology, I am coming across many weird justifications for observed behavior. We want to know why monkeys eat a certain fruit, so someone postulates that they do so for the benefits that it provides. The problem is that this idea requires one to believe that monkeys understand the nutritional/situational qualities of some fruit in comparison with others. I could just as well be that they prefer the taste over other fruits or that the fruit benefits from being eaten because of its effect. That's vague, but if I gave any more details away, I'd be throwing out one of the cooler points in my next "10 things" article.

    My point is that information these days seems to come with justification or opinion. In actuality, all we really need are the facts and then we can piece together the justifications once we have enough knowledge. So, to address the irony, why do I present my points with opinions? I have an agenda.
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  9. The process you describe is natural and a part of science. it is the ultimate justification for peer review in the scientific publication process and for open debate on the merits of theories. Science though is not immune to, just a little more resistant to, all of the pressures that any other lobby or represented group does.

    Scientists have careers, and their focus is on where the grant money and funding comes from. Many of them don't have impartial financiers. Many of them carry surprising dogmas with them, yes you can do science and be open in one area and dogmatic in another. Many disturbingly bigoted. Many are surprisingly incompetent. Sorry if any scientists happen by, the same is true of the rest of us, of the politicians, the engineers, the hairdressers ... I'm not singling you out. Just making clear that Science is something that emerges form this human backdrop and almost unique among human endeavors, works by some basic rules that hope to minimize the corruption, and keep it able to produce real new knowledge, not just new dogmas. Philosophers have a good crack at it too, but then they are good bedfellows for scientists anyhow.

    Information I suspect has always come with justification and opinion, there's just more of it now than once upon a time. We may indeed only need the facts, but it is a rare an impartial source that delivers only facts and arguably non-existent. I would grant some sources are more opinionated others less, but I'm not aware of any that are free of it.

    Even the simplest of bullet pointed facts is usually laced with opinion, hidden in the selection and filtering process. Someone assembled those facts, and not other ones, for a reason, some point was to be made. Even if the presenter has no point to make their sources do, ultimately they report facts that come from measurement systems, from other people or tools made by other people all laced with the same reality of hidden or open agendas.

    Even peer review can be corrupted. The choice of peers is laced with agenda. The peers themselves are few in number and have agendas (the idea is that diverse agendas will tend to cancel out). And so too the openness to debate is corruptible and regularly seen to be and for good reasons. Scientists themselves stifle debate when they have an agenda.

    Global warming is perhaps the most salient modern example of theory that has its backers and it's nay-sayers and the backers are so panicked by the realities it predicts that stifling debate is firmly on their agenda. Debate costs money, it costs time and we have none of this to spare say the backers (I'm inclined to side with them on that one, but am clear that it's a statement of faith on my part). And then science is wielded against science. Science concludes we have not the time or money to waste arguing the reality of the risk and likelihood of the impact any more, and science says that we have the right to argue it. We want it all scrutinized, peer reviews, not with all those bigoted on-side reviewers, by some of the nayisayers etc ... Science is political. everything is political, this blog is political, the air I breath is political. It cannot be escaped. But science makes a stand all the same and is cleaner than most ...
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