Image: Mushroom and Rooster, flickr. Licensed under Creative Commons.
In the latest issue of the Atlantic Monthly, linked at TechCrunch, Michael Hirschorn argues that the internet in general, and increasingly social media in particular (for example, Sarah Palin’s sly use of Twitter), have warped the pursuit of truth in political debates.
[F]actual counterrorism is a tricky enterprise in this era of asymmetric information warfare. The urge to shape the data to suit the message, to outfit one’s argument with a set of misappropriated, cynically edited, or simply fabricated facts that can be fed into a self-sustaining partisan loop, will no doubt prove irresistible to many.–Michael Hirschorn
You could accuse him of naiveté, I suppose. After all, haven’t political deceptions been around since at least the Trojan Horse, not to mention the Platonic and Aristotelian ideas of rhetoric, Machiavelli’s statecraft and the ‘noble lies’ and propaganda campaigns of modern wars?
But Hirschorn recognises this himself. What has changed, he suggests, is the ubiquity of the internet, the variety and precision of its opportunities for manipulation and fabrication, its popular presence and perhaps the shortened attention span that it encourages, reducing the likelihood of patient analysis.
Perhaps, also, the appearance of things ‘published’ on the internet can give an impression of authority. When traditional gatekeepers governed publication (which of course had its own distorting downside), the dignity and prestige of publication was not so freely available. This speculation must be qualified since there are many savvy commentators attuned to the legitimacy or otherwise of ‘facts’ paraded on websites (Hirschorn gives the example of the St Petersburg Times Politifact).
But the attachment of many forms of digital media to popularity as an index of worth is a real concern. As Hirschorn notes, right-wing ‘Digg Patriots’ employed so-called ‘bury brigades’ that were able to vote down and bury left-leaning stories and facts it found unpalatable. In other words, the deficiencies of the idea of a marketplace of ideas where truth wins out is no less evident in new media than it is and was in traditional media.
George Orwell’s 1984 imagined (and in fact observed in his own time) people being employed to carefully fabricate ‘facts’ to prop up an authoritarian state. What he did not anticipate was what Hirschorn calls ‘the speed with which properly packaged (dis)information can spread and how hard it is for fact and reason to catch up’.
I assume here what was attributed to US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and quoted by Hirschorn, that ‘we may each be entitled to our own set of opinions, but we are not entitled to our own set of facts’. This pits me against the postmodernists and evangelical relativists and sceptics, I suppose.
But I certainly recognise the importance of ideology, of perspective and context, of the need for diverse and vigorous debate and of the tentative and contested nature of facts (see E.H. Carr’s classic What is History?).
I just don’t believe that everything is subjective, that everything is a matter of mere opinion.
I can only agree