The Tower of Babble is Back

A couple of generations ago, Newton Minnow, the late Commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, called  television “a vast wasteland,” and that was back in 1961, before the media explosion reached its current apogee.  He might have had even stronger words to say about the internet today, if he were alive to see it.

Today, more than ever before,our mass communications have become a vast cesspool of polluted facts and unsubstantiated opinions. The problem with the internet could be summed up with the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous epigram, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.”

The problem with the internet, in the simplest possible terms, is that it went from being the technonerd playground to the most powerful advertising medium ever invented, a medium in which advertising can be custom-tailored to your individual interests to the point where advertising becomes manipulation.

The antecedents of this media madness can be traced back to two men, Edward Bernays and Albert Lasker, respectively known as the father of public relations and the father of modern advertising.

Edward  Bernays (1891- 1995) , one of Sigmund Freud’s favorite nephews, took his uncle’s observations about human psychology and applied them to the practice of “public relations,” a term he invented to describe the process of manipulating public attitudes toward contemporary issues through the use of mass media.

As the world’s first public relations consultant, he advised American presidents from Woodrow Wilson to Dwight David Eisenhower.  Unfortunately, one of his most astute students was Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s propaganda chieftain, but it was Hitler himself who invented the concept of  the “Big Lie,” which he described in great detail in his autobiography, Mein Kampf.

Albert Lasker (1888 -1952), also from a German Jewish family, parlayed his father’s success in banking into a successful career as one of the first advertising industry superstars, a career in which he applied many of Bernays insights to the practice of using media to manipulate the buying habits of American consumers through mass media.

In a relatively short lifetime, Lasker changed the way that merchants thought about advertising.  Whenever someone quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous line, “Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door,” Lasker said that it may or may not be true about mousetraps, but nothing else moves off the shelves without an advertising campaign to move them.

That’s the problem in a nutshell.  It’s one thing to sell soap flakes with advertising and public relations, but it is quite a different – and much more pernicious – thing to manipulate public policy by lying about the facts. Without pointing finger at any one party in particular, political parties have latched onto Hitler’s concept of the Big Lie in the belief that the same lies told over and over again gradually become indistinguishable from the truth. As Hitler taught his propaganda chief, the bigger the lie, the easier it is to sell it

So, where are the truthsayers?  Who are they?  How do you find them?

There is a much longer answer to these questions, but the short answer is that they are us. We are the truthsayers, but we are being stifled by a media establishment that manipulates information, controls access to data, and places increasingly more stringent controls on interpersonal communications.

But how can that be true? Don’t we have access to more, faster, better, and increasingly ubiquitous communications tools?

Yes and no.  We have more, faster, and more pervasive communications…but the communications we receive aren’t necessarily better, more accurate, or even truthful. What we have instead is cognitive dissonance, a disconnect between our personal experiences and the information we receive from third parties through the media.  This is where the interference factor comes into play. The more often our trains of thought are “interfered” with by extraneous and distracting information, the more difficult it is for to form clear impressions about the questions that trouble us.

One of the most damaging forms of interference is the cacophony of multiple inputs. Do this thought experiment.

Imagine yourself on the top floor of a tall building, talking with a friend about a personal matter.  At the next stop two more people get on the elevator, having their own private conversation. On each floor, two more people board your elevator and, before you know it, it is impossible for anyone to hear anyone else speak.

Now, imagine that, on each floor, the Muzak being pumped into the elevator gets a little louder until, by the time you get to the ground floor, no one is speaking and everyone is being inundated with the same prerecorded messages. The natural result is that everyone, under these circumstances, simply stops speaking because no one can hear what anyone else is saying because of the interference factor.

The relatively high density of the number of listeners also inhibits us from sharing our thoughts with others. On the internet, there is no such thing as a private conversation, even when you are having a private chat because the other party can simply copy your chat and share it with others.

That is our situation today.  We can’t communicate with each other effectively because we are constantly being distracted by more and more intrusive messages from mass media, tailored to our prejudices, reinforcing our misconceptions about the world around us in a negative feedback loop that makes it almost impossible to hear ourselves think, or to communicate with each other. The ancient Jews told a story about the confusion of information.  They called it the Tower of Babel. Today, we might want to start calling it the Tower of Babble.

It is a tower of Babble because the 24 hour news cycle continues to drone poorly digested information into the news feed, with the same stories being repetitively covered over and over again, by the hundreds, often rewritten from the same sources, and sometimes rewritten from each other, creating an increasingly unreliable body of data (and data, remember, can be true or false ) from which we all dip our portions of information from.

Stop and think about the things you think you know.  Where did that information come from, and where did they get that information from?

In the now-vanished world of imperishable communications, it was possible to determine the provenance of each and every fact that has come into our possession, because it was either written down or printed on sheets of paper. Paper rots, but scraps of writing have survived for thousands of years and some of the paper being produced today (notably the plastic stuff that Canadian currency is printed on) will last virtually forever, far longer than any mass storage device.  Yet, today, with everything stored electronically, nothing is sacrosanct and no one knows what the truth is any more, to quote The Moody Blues, because anything stored electronically can be altered electronically or simply erased.

Today, in an uncanny echo of George Orwell’s dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, information is no longer immutable, no longer imperishable. Instead, information is constantly being revised, manipulated, contradicted, colored, excluded and censored in much the same manner in which Orwell’s classic anti-hero Winston Smith is employed by “Big Brother’s” all-seeing, all-knowing government to rewrite history, to remove articles from newspapers and replace them with rewritten articles that reflect the constantly changing priorities of the “benevolent,”  thought-controlling dictatorship.

Most people are under the mistaken belief that Orwell was writing about the manipulation of mass media by Hitler’s Nazis.  He was really writing about the manipulation of the British news media during World War II, on the basis of his wife’s experiences as one of the censors who controlled British news media during the war. Orwell was aghast at the manner in which the government continued to censor the media after the reason for the censorship no longer existed.  He saw the development of the “permanent war economy” and extrapolated from that economic reality the eventual subjugation of entire populations through the use of media.

So, what are we going to do about it?  Nothing, without you, because this isn’t anything that any individual, or any  group of individuals can address or correct.  This is an all-hands operation.  We all have to become truth sayers and, in order to become truth sayers, we have to become truth hunters, but truth hunters are, in truth, an endangered species. They are endangered by an intellectual establishment that favors form over function on the graduate levels, and eschews actual research for the case study method, which is an example of applying last year’s solution to next year’s problems. They may deny it, most do, but post-graduate education is an exercise in enforced conformity in many disciplines, which leaves it for the mavericks to break new ground and forge progress.

In the interim, however, we have painted ourselves into an intellectual corner in which every exploration of data is subjected to a political litmus test by one segment of the political spectrum or another which, liking some ideas and hating others, have destroyed the very basis upon which knowledge is verified: consensus.

What is needed – and what does not exist – is a platform from which people who really care about the facts can present both sides of any given story, or more if there are more than two sides, as there often are, and come to a reasonable conclusion about where the truth lies on the basis of the available information.

Information outlets controlled by the corporate culture that dominates our capitalist society are not going to perform that function. The question is whether the corporate conglomerates will actually permit anyone else to perform that function in their stead is moot because we can see how they are controlling the public conversation. Nothing scares corporate America more than the idea of a popular information resource that is beholden to no one and able therefore to call it like it is.

We may fail in this effort but that’s all right.  Not making the effort is not all right.