hatman | (no subject)

Related to the Coffee Party bit from yesterday...

I've been thinking for a while now that we have a real problem in politics here in the US (and quite possibly elsewhere, come to that). It's a very strange problem, and it's one that goes greatly against my deeply-held beliefs.

There is too much information, and it's too easy to get.

It is really strange to write that. I believe in freedom of information. I believe in purity of information. I believe that if we could all just speak plainly and truthfully the world would be a much better place, despite the loss of short-term pain saving social niceties (though of course there's still room for tact even after prioritizing blunt honesty). If I have a religion, it's that.

(What's odd is the conflict of that belief with my views on Wikipedia. Their idea is that if you just bring everyone together, the truth will eventually naturally rise to the top. Which kind of fits in with my views on the bigger picture and the desire to open the floodgates of information worldwide. Cut through the propaganda and let people see that the people on the other side are just that - people. Not the evil baby-killing monsters that some would have you believe. But Wiki's truth by consensus, the way they've set it up so that anyone can alter it to suit their own beliefs at (pretty much) any time, means that it's unreliable. Hearsay. Maybe the truth will generally rise to the top, but in any particular case you just can't be sure.)

Here's the problem, though... There's more information, available from more sources, than it's humanly possible to take in. You have no choice; you have to filter it. You have to pick and choose your sources. And when you do that, you're naturally going to gravitate towards the ones that fit your own worldview, your own preconceptions. And even if you decide to check out the others, it will be with the (perhaps subconscious) understanding that they have the wrong bias.

There's no longer a Walter Cronkite^* to give us all a reliable, even-handed view and tell us, "...and that's the way it is." You've got the Fox News people and the MSNBC people. The World Net Daily people and the Daily Kos people. And they all hold CNN and its ever-more-superficial coverage in contempt.

^*And how cool is it that the correct spelling of that name was in FireFox's built-in spell-check dictionary?

We've got two parties, with both sides becoming more and more polarized. And as that happens, each side turns more and more to its own sources of information. Which means that each side now effectively has its own facts. The people on the left know just as surely that Bush lied to get us into Iraq as the people on the right know that Obama's health care plan is a socialist disaster that's going to fund abortions with taxpayer money. And neither side is going to believe the other. Instead, they'll just turn to the "trustworthy" newscasters who give them the "real story" that reinforces what they already believe.

Which leads to the nuts out there who still believe, for example, that Obama doesn't have a valid US birth certificate and won't trust anyone who tells them otherwise. (Even though World Net Daily verified the thing a year ago.)

Information overload has broken the system. It's hard for me to accept, but it's clearly true. And I don't know how it's going to get fixed.

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I reached this conclusion a couple of years ago. I have now graduated to wanting to bomb the blogosphere at large. Everyone with a soapbox is now considered a "pundit". (It is amusing that the Singhalese word "punditha" which derives from the same Sanskrit stem of "pundit", now means a person with a swelled ego who purports to know more than he actually does.) And don't even get me started on Twitter reporting and "citizen journalism".

Freedom of information exchange is one thing, but now what we have is a state of affairs where everyone is screaming their own agenda so loudly that nobody can hear a damn thing properly because of all the noise.

It's not just the blogosphere, though. There are a bazillion cable channels, and you'd think that someone with his own TV show would know what he was talking about, but then there's, say, Glen Beck. And yet people believe him. Vehemently. And the thing is that there's no accountability. He can say whatever the heck he wants. That much is his right. Free speech. But the right to free speech doesn't include the right to keep your own TV show no matter what you say. Except that what he says gets ratings. So he gets to keep saying it, even if it's outright lies, stark raving paranoia, and bald racism. It's gotten to the point that there's an entire Stop Beck campaign which has gotten over a hundred advertisers to pull their sponsorship lest they be connected with his rants - in the UK, every single advertiser he had has pulled away - and yet he's still on the air because he brings viewers to the network and that's all that matters.

I think that's what gets me. I believe in the flow of information, but there has to be accountability. Lies should have consequences. Propaganda should be exposed by fact checking. And there are people trying to do that, but they can't keep up with the volume of crap being spewed into the stream. And only a small percentage of people even bother listening to the fact checkers anyway.

Instead, we've just lost the middle ground. We just retreat more and more into our own beliefs, surrounding ourselves with the sources that play to them. And if they tell us what we want to hear - or at least spin it in the way we want it spun - then we'll believe them. And there's no accountability. That has to change, but I don't see how.