The digital communications technology that was once imagined as a universe of transparent and perpetual illumination, in which cancerous falsehoods would perish beneath a saturation bombardment of irradiating data, has instead generated a much murkier and verification-free habitat where a google-generated search will deliver an electronic page on which links to lies and lunacy appear in identical format as those to truths and sanity. But why should we ever have assumed that technology and reason would be mutually self-reinforcing? The quickest visit to say, a site called Stormfront will persuade you that the demonic is in fact the best customer of the electronic. pp. 86-87
Schama, Simon. 2010. Scribble, scribble, scribble: writings on politics, ice cream, Churchill, and my mother. New York: Ecco.
Simon Schama’s most recent book had many thought-provoking quotes in it - and this one in particular got me to thinking about the information that we share and consume online.
I have no grand thesis for this post, but I do want to send out a few questions to the internet. As much as I (and many others) might champion all this information out there, has this ever-increasing pool of readily available information really made the world a better place? Or, has it made people indiscriminate and mindless consumers of information?
I do think that Mr. Schama’s point about the incorrect assumption of the illuminating qualities of the masses of data available online is absolutely right. Many “technologists” (for lack of a better word) did, and still do, cling to the hope that the “good” information out there will triumph over the “bad” information. This, I think, is ludicrously naive. Information is not sentient - it does not know if it is good or bad, and even if it knew this, it can still be bent to good or nefarious purposes. Furthermore, information does not battle with itself - it simply exists. It is up to the person consuming and adapting that information to give it purpose, weight, and meaning. Indeed, this idea of creating data online for nefarious purposes (then having it become worse than the creators imagined) has a great illustration in this video:
Stuxnet: Anatomy of a Computer Virus from Patrick Clair on Vimeo.
But why has this information not gained the role of “irradiating data?” The ease of publishing anything online has really lowered the intellectual standards of what it is we read and watch. Not that I am saying that this ease is inherently evil, or that we need more “gatekeepers” - no, this blog would not exist without the ease of publishing and sharing online. Perhaps the problem lies deeper than simply the speed and ease of sharing online. For the past 1500 years or so, the medium in which information was shared and consumed was the physically printed word. This was an accepted social standard with its own systems and standards. It seems to me that people still use this system for consuming and evaluating information - but the method of sharing information has drastically changed. The relative expense and effort related to the printing of words on paper generally created a barrier; publishers and organizations would be averse to going to the trouble and expense of publishing. Perhaps it wasn’t a barrier - perhaps it was more of a valve - in that this process controlled the amount of information available to people. Indeed, now that this valve has been removed, there is exponentially more information - both good and bad - there simply would not have been the same amount of information available under the old system.
This is a lovely segue into my second point - that people work from the assumption that publishing information anywhere gives the text a similar level of authority to information that has been thoughtfully researched, constructed, and vetted. That assumption can no longer be made about everything we read online. Have people become so lazy that we no longer take the effort to winnow the good from the bad? Has the instant nature of the Google search rendered us, more and more, unthinking automatons, regurgitating information that is simply the top hit we found online - much like the recent Bing commercials?
I hope not. I would like to have more faith in people than that. I think if we can somehow begin (gently) reminding people to be not just passive consumers, but active evaluators of what it is we read and share online, we might be able to give everyone a leg up in this information world.
Part of the problem is "evaluation," or lack thereof, without question. People aren't generally taught how to evaluate a text (or an idea, or a source) critically, objectively, and thoroughly.
ReplyDeleteBut there's more to it than that. So much of how people perceive the world is becoming more polarized and insular. It used to be that someone who was considered educated was someone who had read a wide variety of texts from many sources and done a lot of things -- someone who had breadth of experience. In the last 30 or 40 years, breadth and range have been twisted to mean a lack of ideological purity, which is then labeled as negative.
People are no longer celebrating learning from colleges; now they admire intellectual echo chambers. If all you hear are the same five ideas being rehashed by the same six voices, you won't ever be exposed to the opposite of those ideas, or variants of them, or ideas which are completely unrelated. You won't get to hear how other people have interpreted those ideas, or how they've predicted those ideas might play out.
This circles back to lack of evaluation. It's hard to evaluate your source when it's the only source you have. What do you measure it against? How do you pull it apart? If it doesn't hold up, what do you replace it with? Thinking for oneself can be lonely to the point of terrifying, and for some people feels genuinely like insanity.
There's also the pressure of the group, particularly when the group lives in the same echo chamber. If you start to question the six sources, but nobody else does, you may be labeled as "no longer part of the tribe." That's uncomfortable at best and isolating at worst. People can be afraid to question their sources if they were taught that the source (for example, a religious text) is a bedrock of their very existence. How do you question your own bones?
The truth is that even our bones qualify for examination, and for rejection if their truth-claims don't hold up. And that scares the crap out of some people. They want the easy, comforting thoughts that everyone around them is parroting, because it makes them feel safe, and part of the tribe. "We are all the same! We are all together!"
If you start to evaluate and dissect what you read, what you hear, you might find that "what everybody thinks" isn't the truth, and then you have to decide if you want to confront everybody about it. Not everyone is strong enough for that.
One last thought: as Jonathan Swift pointed out, you can't reason someone out of a position he didn't reason himself into. And much of what passes for "information" or "discourse" lately is just opinion and rant, heavily flavored with emotions -- fear, anger, frustration. Most people don't evaluate fear. They don't analyze frustration, or dissect anger. They just feel it. And they react to it. So all the careful critical discussion in the world isn't going to break through that kind of emotional barrier.
Hi Kate,
ReplyDeleteThanks for your thoughtful response - I am frankly a bit flattered that you put such effort and thought into it. I agree with what you've said, I'd just like to add some comments here and there.
Your first couple of points I think meld together nicely - that people are not taught (and don't see the value in) thinking critically about what it is that is presented to them in any format. This critical thinking training used to be something taught at the university level (as you point out in your second point), but is really waning. More and more individuals go to college for training in a trade, rather than a true liberal-arts education. There was a recent New Yorker article that dealt with just this issue. Of course, I am being critical of that process, even though with my MSLIS I am, in a way, a product of training for a trade/profession.
Beyond just education, people (as you point out) flatly refuse to hear and consider other viewpoints. We surround ourselves with people that are very similar, and push those away that are different. Some diversity, I think, is quite good to have among your friends and acquaintances.
That said, I hold out hope for people - and especially people of my generation and younger - that the light will come on and they will see the value of discourse and difference - as I tried to allude to in the post.
Once again, thanks for your great comment - I look forward to more comments from you in the future!
Thanks! I found you via my sister's Twitter feed from the other day. Now I'll have to scour the rest of your site to see what all else you have to say. :)
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