The kinda funny thing for me: we’ve always had a version of this problem. Conspiracy theories were always a thing, and certain apologists for certain religions especially were long quick to retreat to a sort of convenient, on-demand solipsism to preserve their favoured cosmology… Facts not pointing where you’d like? Well, what’s a ‘fact’, anyway…
What’s new, I guess, is partly the means and ubiquity, and partly the theater in which it’s deployed. And, of course, the sheer, towering volume of it. And how brazen, bizarre, unapologetically flagrantly pants on fire the misinformation has become, a peculiar retreat from relative sophistication to just loading it on by the megaton, even a token effort at telling a coherent lie be damned. And how profoundly and obviously so much of it is about distraction, diversion. Again, it was _always_ kinda about that, but the net, especially, is such a noisy, toxic stew of bizarre nonsense, I think it’s clear enough: ubiquity really changes the game. It’s as though the sheer volume of it has lowered people’s expectations, maybe made them, oddly, more gullible, functionally, just because with this vast heap of informational junk food pouring over them, they get in the habit of just diving into it, numbed by it, confused, slowly seduced to the notion there’s no real point in filtering, assessing. Worse, while I think most people do understand there’s a necessity to challenge, to test, to refute suspect information, they may just get tired, like it’s continuously having to swim against a current. And thus we drown, dragged down by listicles and constant clickbait. Modern misinformation strategies do seem to exploit this, the sheer size of the bore of the hose. Don’t try to defend the previous lie… Just load on fifty more, keep people exhausted, saturated by it all.
(Addendum: it’s also striking to me how much of this Chomsky and Herman (and others of similar bent) described some 30 years ago… The sorta sad thing being: even with the technology being theoretically more peer to peer, with fewer obvious points for gatekeeping and filtration, you get much the same picture. Or worse. Again, the key differences between media then and now seems to me to be in the relative significance of volume and distraction, probably because that’s what works in the more fractured media landscape of now.)
The kinda funny thing for me: we’ve always had a version of this problem. Conspiracy theories were always a thing, and certain apologists for certain religions especially were long quick to retreat to a sort of convenient, on-demand solipsism to preserve their favoured cosmology… Facts not pointing where you’d like? Well, what’s a ‘fact’, anyway…
What’s new, I guess, is partly the means and ubiquity, and partly the theater in which it’s deployed. And, of course, the sheer, towering volume of it. And how brazen, bizarre, unapologetically flagrantly pants on fire the misinformation has become, a peculiar retreat from relative sophistication to just loading it on by the megaton, even a token effort at telling a coherent lie be damned. And how profoundly and obviously so much of it is about distraction, diversion. Again, it was _always_ kinda about that, but the net, especially, is such a noisy, toxic stew of bizarre nonsense, I think it’s clear enough: ubiquity really changes the game. It’s as though the sheer volume of it has lowered people’s expectations, maybe made them, oddly, more gullible, functionally, just because with this vast heap of informational junk food pouring over them, they get in the habit of just diving into it, numbed by it, confused, slowly seduced to the notion there’s no real point in filtering, assessing. Worse, while I think most people do understand there’s a necessity to challenge, to test, to refute suspect information, they may just get tired, like it’s continuously having to swim against a current. And thus we drown, dragged down by listicles and constant clickbait. Modern misinformation strategies do seem to exploit this, the sheer size of the bore of the hose. Don’t try to defend the previous lie… Just load on fifty more, keep people exhausted, saturated by it all.
(Addendum: it’s also striking to me how much of this Chomsky and Herman (and others of similar bent) described some 30 years ago… The sorta sad thing being: even with the technology being theoretically more peer to peer, with fewer obvious points for gatekeeping and filtration, you get much the same picture. Or worse. Again, the key differences between media then and now seems to me to be in the relative significance of volume and distraction, probably because that’s what works in the more fractured media landscape of now.)
#1
Bullseye. This would make a great guest post.