The internet age was supposed to be the age of information. The age in which all information known to humankind, could be shared democratically to all of humankind. It was the idea that someone that lived in the Congo could have the same access to information as someone in Paris, so long as they had a connection to the internet (albeit perhaps not as reliable). That was the promise with which it was launched. A naive and childish promise.
Sure, the supporters will pipe up and claim that various revolutions have been initiated through this very web of information I call naive and childish. The Arab spring, they’ll say. To them I say, sure, and what has been the ultimate effect? Are the Arab revolutionaries better off? Could the same have began (not through the same means, of course), without this so-called internet?
Wait, let’s back up. I think that in my ire, I may not be properly framing my post. The internet is really an abstract, yet also concrete, idea. The easy part is the concrete aspect of the internet. It is simply a very large network of computers (all of our computers, when turned on, join this network). This large network of computers all communicate through an agreed-upon protocol. This aspect of the internet is not naive nor childish. It is a very difficult technological feat. Through engineering and imagination, we have extended the protocol of the internet to be everywhere and even without the need for wires.
The less concrete idea of the internet is everything that runs atop it. Email, text, video, voice, security cameras, commerce and social media. It is the latter that has been the most problematic as far as its ability to spread both, information and misinformation. Before social media, email was the biggest culprit, but there were certain guardrails in place that prevented it from spreading too far. These guardrails were in the form of social norms (you don’t want to be the spammer in your family, workplace, or circle of friends), and most importantly, the chances of said spam reaching the email address of a trusted news correspondent were slim.
Social media, in the way it is constructed, reverses the role of the spammer (though you may still be known as that), to more of poster (no pun intended). Meaning, you are simply posting the “information” on your “wall”, the fact that social media spams all of that information to your followers is not your fault. The second guardrail which social media removes, though I am not sure if all of the blame should be placed on them, or the media itself, is that media outlets will actually use social media as a news source. To me, this is one of the most important services the media provided. And like those privileges that one takes for granted, they go away.
In the early 2010s, when social media exploded, in an effort to seem more hip, news outlets began to relay more and more on these unvetted sources. For a while, there was a symbiotic relationship between them and nobody paid any mind. But soon, social hackers realized that as respected news outlets utilized more and more of those unvetted sources, they (news), in turn provided social media sources with relevance and power. By the middle of the 2010s, the dynamics in how people ingested their news had shifted from trusted resources, to social media. In a way, news outlets had shot themselves in the foot by legitimizing social media as a trustworthy source of information, promoting it, and linking to it.
Social hackers seized on the opportunity presented to them and aimed for the head. In the beginning, before Trump, there were small, cult-like, websites peddling conspiracy theories. People that visited them either knew this, or chose to ignore it, but these theories seldom went much further than those circles. However, with the arrival of Trump, the lord of hacking, an all-out-war began. First through “fake news”, later through his administration seize on news conferences where serious journalists could ask real questions (though they seldom got real answers), and now through a new assault on any type of factual information. Making the prospects for real, trustworthy, journalism to be very dim.
How dim, you ask?
Listen to McKay Coppins talk about the steps that Trump’s re-election campaign has taken and how disinformation, even if we think we are immune to it, has the intended effect; to make us question everything… even things we know are truthful.
