Deluding ourselves to death?

I don’t think the current issue of misinformation online is an outcome of “propagandists” running riot, nor is it just a problem of people being stupid or “not thinking critically” (whatever that might mean, exactly). I do think it’s a problem. But, in the spirit of media ecology, I would describe it as a problem arising from how the contemporary digital environment has a bias. The bias is a blind spot as to how and why “misinformation” (although I prefer “misunderstandings and belief in false information”) propagates online.

The way I see it is this: in the 1990s through to the 21st century, digital utopianists saw in the new medium of the internet a tool of liberation. Specifically, they saw in it the possibility of a radical democratisation of knowledge, one in which the crowd – a group of unaffiliated individuals – could produce knowledge in way that was at least as reliable as expert knowledge, if not more so. As these digital revolutionaries became the tech elites of the 21s century, they further developed the internet guided by the assumption that access to information was everything: give people access, they would become informed.

Of course, denying access to information, or claiming to have exclusive knowledge of something, would be cardinal sins working under such an assumption. “Expert” in this informationalist understanding of knowledge is akin to “tyrant”: both seek to define truth for others imperiously, via authority and coercion, not through sharing of information.

As of 2024, I think modern digital media has been wildly successful at undermining expert authority, in the name of freeing the individual from being taken in by the biases and political agendas of knowledge elites. In doing so, it has utterly neglected, if not outright fed into, biases and agendas of the individual. The biggest threat to the integrity of knowledge isn’t abuse by knowledge elites anymore. It’s us.

Ironically, the most salient way that I think we as individuals delude ourselves was described by an author whose book famously argued that unskilled individuals, working collectively, could yield better knowledge than experts. James Surowiecki’s book The Wisdom of Crowds is largely known for presenting this argument. A part of his argument not so generally well-known is that he claimed this applied only in a particular arrangement of communication. Specifically, for the crowd to have this “wisdom”, they needed to each work completely individually, with NO knowledge of what any other individual’s answer was. Only at the end is all the individual effort compiled and combined. If this precondition of isolation didn’t apply, then instead of “wisdom”, you could get an “information cascade”.

An information cascade is a situation where people start believing something is true solely because so many others are claiming it to be true. In a sufficiently connected environment, the information cascade…well, it cascades. Or it snowballs: each new person who professes a belief in the cascaded information becomes further “proof” that it is true.

Writing in 2004, when Web 2.0 hype was just gearing up, Surowiecki understandably saw the new and still largely empty space of the online world as readily allowing individuals to work in isolation from each other, with little to no concern about information cascades. Writing in 2024, I think the internet has become an information cascade supercharger. Ideas spread so easily. But also, the main method of online interaction – social media – privileges and prioritises the sociality of communication over its rationality. How likely is it that this encourages people to judge what they hear based on who they hear it from and nothing else?

I don’t think this process can be combatted with legislation, and there are some legitimate worries tied up in the purported “tyranny” of the expert. But I think there are at least 2 questions everyone should ask themselves

1. If people I know and trust are all saying that something is true, have any of us actually verified anything, or are we all assuming the word of others is good enough?
2. If someone I am predisposed to view as malicious (a member of an opposing political ideology, say, or just someone I dislike generally) shares information that I know to be false, was this falsehood really circulated due to malicious intent, or were they just taken in by an information cascade?