I sometimes think about information and how the usual ideas don’t help me think about *information overload*, or *disinformation*, or *propaganda*.
So what is information?
“Information reduces uncertainty. The uncertainty of an event is measured by its probability of occurrence and is inversely proportional to that. The more uncertain an event, the more information is required to resolve uncertainty of that event.” – Wikipedia
I’m not sure how useful that is to me. Let me think about it in terms of something I know: weather forecast. If I don’t know what the weather is and I look outside and see the rain, then I know it rains. Let’s assume that I know any typical moment in Switzerland has a 5% chance of being rainy. So the uncertainty was 5%, and by looking outside I managed to gather information: I probability of rain is now 0% or 100%, depending on the outcome. And the information that it is currently raining is more valuable than the information that it doesn’t because I could have guessed that it doesn’t rain and I would have been right in 95% of all cases.
A similar idea is what I’ve heard say in the past about the weather forecast: if you just forecast the same weather for tomorrow as you’re seeing today, you’re going to be right 80% of the time. That’s why weather forecast is hard: you’re trying to push those 80% further up and it gets more expensive the closer to 100% you’re getting.
So now I’m thinking about this and I wonder.
If information isn’t *actionable* then I can’t do anything based on the information I learn. Learning about the weather in America isn’t useful for me because I can’t *do* anything with the information as I’m in Europe. Almost all the news that we see in the media falls roughly into this category. What are you going to *do* based on this? My guess is that the only information in traditional media that has an effect on my behaviour are items that make me buy things, and items that make me change my vote. Once I’m not buying stuff, and I’m set in my ways, traditional media has practically no value for me.
If information isn’t different from the *mainstream* then I can’t do anything different from what everybody else is doing. That’s similar to the weather forecast issue. I can always look at my friends and neighbours in order to figure out what to buy and who to vote for. Thus, traditional media needs to provide interesting and exotic information for me to read it. If everybody knows about Dieselgate and doesn’t buy a Diesel car, then what else is there to write about it?
Everything else seems to be a matter of *entertainment* (and feeling smug about the unwashed masses might count as a very simple form of entertainment). But it isn’t useful information. I find myself in this situation often enough. Somebody reads a newspaper and wants to talk to me about celebrities or crime or TV and I just can’t be bothered. I won’t change my behaviour. It isn’t novel and different enough from what everybody else knows. I am seldomly entertained.
I guess from the point of view of the *state* having citizens sharing a lot of values is a benefit. But sadly, my individual wishes go against this. As an individual, I prefer a disorganized, fragmented information landscape. But doesn’t that open the doors to the better organised parties? You just fake it: claim to be the underdog, the citizen reporter, show the outrageous material, emphasise the anger, the rage, the injustice, fan the fire, mobilise your readrs and push people to action when it’s time to get things done.
I’m stuck somewhere around here. Does that mean we just need to counter-organise? Feed the same outrage? Or resort to the ideals of the renaissance and write books like *Nathan the Wise* and hope for the best? I don’t know. I don’t know.
But *something* needs to be done!
#Information #Philosophy
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I just read Still Manufacturing Consent: An Interview With Noam Chomsky. Very good. Here’s the Wikipedia page on the book, Manufacturing Consent.
Still Manufacturing Consent: An Interview With Noam Chomsky
“So take the last German elections, for example. There was a lot of talk about potential Russian interference, that the Russians would undermine the election and so on. It turns out there *was* interference in the election. It was not Russian. It was from the United States. A media company that works for nice guys like Trump, Le Pen and Netanyahu got together with **Facebook**, and the **Facebook** office of Berlin provided them with extensive details of the kind they have on German voters, so then the media company could microtarget ads to specific voters to try to influence them to vote in a certain way. For whom? For Alternative für Deutschland, the neo-fascist party! Which probably is a factor in their surprisingly high vote.” – Noam Chomsky
– Alex Schroeder 2019-10-16 10:34 UTC