Being educated like I was in a time before the digital age sometimes presented challenges, particularly when you had to carry out research for a school or university assignment. The primary place you had to go to for information was the library, and chances were that one of your more enterprising classmates had already borrowed one or more of the books which was going to be critical to your efforts. Therefore it was often a struggle to reference any more than the minimum two sources required to make sure your assignment wasn't blatant plagiarism and thereafter, submit a credibly researched paper.
This is one of the reasons in the mid 1990s I became quite interested in the development of digital encyclopedias like Encarta and then subsequently, on-line research tools. As the internet started to take off, the possibilities for education seemed huge. For the first time ever, all the accumulated knowledge of humankind became instantly available at the click of the button. Surely, I thought, if anything was going to make people informed and lead to a new era of enlightenment, this was it.
Well, fast forward about 20 years and it's clear how wrong I was.
Instead of becoming more informed, humankind now exists in kind of bizarre "post fact" world where experts are derided, people form their view on issues not through a critical and objective assessment of facts but through the filter of their value system and language and debate has descended into an unintelligible morass of badly punctuated tweets and streams of emoticons. What the hell happened?
I think a significant factor is that while the internet has provided access to a lot of credible and properly researched information, at the same time it has enabled easy publication of complete rubbish, which over time has come to dominate online discourse.
It's easy to forget in the digital age just how much gravitas used to be associated with publishing something, be that in writing or over a TV or radio network. Most of the news that was available for public consumption was provided either through newspapers or the major television channels, and while they would still often get things wrong, these outlets were subject to journalistic codes of conduct which required them not to distort the basic facts of a story, not to show overt bias, to declare conflicts of interest and certainly not to "troll" anybody because back then, the media companies were attractive targets for anyone wanting to mount a defamation case. Also any journalist who failed to have a basic understanding of grammar, punctuation and how to construct a sentence wouldn't make it past the front door. Similarly with scientific and other specialist journals, anyone looking to have a paper published would have their piece subject to fairly rigorous editorial scrutiny, usually by one of their peer experts in charge of publishing the journal. Quacks looking to promote some form of fringe theory which couldn't be substantiated by fact tended to be dismissed and therefore got the negligible airtime that they deserved.
Because the available "information" was much more limited before the advent of the internet, and was generally of much higher quality, this meant that it was much easier for someone to properly assess what was going on, consider things critically and then come to an informed opinion about the issue of the day, whether that was Australia's involvement in the Vietnam war, Gough Whitlam's sacking or whether taking thalidomide caused defects in unborn children.
Now, however, with the internet awash with all manner of websites, blogs, v-logs and probably a lot of other things that I've never heard of, the situation is a lot more confused and garbled. While in a sense it is positive that publication is no longer the exclusive domain of a bunch of global media companies, enabling anyone with a keyboard and an internet connection to publish whatever they want online has led to its own set of problems.
First and foremost, it greatly dilutes the quality of information available to people, for the reason that crackpots who would not previously had a platform to spread their misinformation and conspiracy theories and who aren't constrained by journalistic codes of conduct or inconvenient facts are free to run riot.
Secondly, it has encouraged the human tendency to seek out and take as gospel information which is supportive of their world view, even if the source of that information is unreliable or incorrect. It's much more comforting if you are anti-vaccer to read about what an unqualified person like Pauline Hanson has to say on the topic than to take the AMA's expert advice. It's something I think we are all guilty of to some extent and has no doubt led to the increasing polarisation of the political debate. Witness the situation in America recently where what was basically objective common-sense public health advice in terms of wearing a face mask during a pandemic got turned into another front in the culture wars. Ridiculous as it sounds, if you wore a mask, you were tagged as a Democrat and if you didn't, you were tagged as a Republican.
Thirdly, the dumbing down of information or its over-simplification such that it gets conveyed by a Facebook post or a 15 word tweet is very dangerous. It is just not possible to communicate complex ideas and concepts that merit lengthy and careful consideration into a throwaway tweet and expect good decisions or outcomes to follow. Worryingly however politicians of all colour seem to have taken to social media like ducks to water, possibly because of the instant publicity it can bring. However as we have seen over the last few years, ignoring key facts and over-simplifying difficult problems are two of the key hallmarks of populism, which method of governing sooner or later ends up in disaster.
I mention all this because looking at the current state of the Presidential campaign in the USA, the same depressing script as 2016 is playing out. It's hard to think of one thing that has got better in the USA over the past 4 years as the country has alienated its allies, weakened its institutions, started an "easy to win" trade war with China and Europe that shows no signs of ending, run up record government debt of $25 trillion, has major civil unrest and is on track to record 300,000 plus COVID-related deaths by the end of the year. Even the economy which was going fairly well before the pandemic has now collapsed, in no small measure due to Trump's complete lack of interest in controlling the virus beyond promoting a couple of dangerous quack cures and telling the country back in February it would somehow just "magically disappear".
Yet in spite of that, you just know what's coming in the run up to the election. Multiple clusterbombs of misinformation, self-serving statements, insults to the Democrats and bald-faced lies will be dropped in the coming weeks. Twitter and his more traditional enablers in Fox News will be awash with constant propaganda which extols Trump's virtues, praises the fantastic job he has done and warning that Biden will do stuff like sell the country out to China, stand down the police force and perhaps most egregiously in the eyes of Republicans, extend health care to all US citizens. Of course, many Americans who have experienced the realities of a Trump presidency won't fall for his BS, but it's almost certain enough of them will to re-elect him for another term.
Unfortunate though it is, this sort of thing is a salient reminder of the dangers of what can happen when people don't think critically or long enough about the information they take in and the reliability of the source. When people pay heed to the loudest voice in the room instead of the smartest and most qualified, invariably bad outcomes follow.
It's true that since its inception, the internet and digital communication more generally have played their role in enabling a lot of loud, ignorant voices to drown out the ones who know what they are talking about (and who also know how to spell). However ultimately it's up to humans to decide which voices they are going to listen to, as the information is certainly all there.
I hope we all make the right choices, because I'm pretty certain the internet with all its foibles is going to be here for the foreseeable future and going back to the library to do our research isn't going to be the best option.
No comments:
Post a Comment