• The made environment short-circuits the worldly reality check.

• The made environment short-circuits the worldly reality check.
In September, 2001 my co-workers spent days in front of the TV, watching the planes crash into the towers over and over, listening to the commentators repeat themselves and each other hundreds of times. The watchers said very little, beyond an occasional Kill 'm all! The TV sucked up all the words and thoughts, leaving the audience little but mute, helpless rage.

I don’t know when it started --with the advent of language, or cities, or the printing press?-- but at some point our environment shifted from being dominated by the natural order to one predominantly symbolic. In any case, we can no longer count on the “worldliness” of our knowledge, the reality check of nature responding to our efforts. While it makes available hundreds of years of accumulated knowledge, the information age also automates disinformation and intensifies the structural limitations of the way we think. This would be true even if the media had other goals besides power and profit.

We can’t rely so much on our schemas, for one thing. Generalizing about the world, drawing abstractions and forgetting the particulars, is usually no drawback as long as for each new challenge, we can go back to the well of reality. We get in trouble, however, when we pile one abstracted idea on top of another on top of another, compounding our error, until we’re very far removed from the world.

Campbell likens it to calculators manipulating square roots; even though the machines can calculate out to eight or ten decimal places, at some point they have to round off to some tiny fraction, maybe billionths. That’s close enough for most purposes. But if you start multiplying numbers with these very tiny errors, very soon the results you get can be off target by a very large margin (Jeremy Campbell 101). Perhaps something like this out-of-control feedback loop happens when we form exclusive religions, or country clubs, or death squads. We keep compounding the initial misinformation, and have no way to solve our problems or correct our course. Rather (as I discuss below), the incentives are all to propagate the error, to patch over the rude intrusions of the real world, to keep afloat an ideological structure that becomes more unbalanced every day. Maybe this is why we fight so much over sex; we can distort and pervert it, but it remains one of our few almost ineradicable gateways to reality. It’s a cliché, but true anyway: the bosses cannot finally control the way we think until they can control how we have sex. But for most issues, even as we see the gulf yawn between our ideas and the world, the gulf itself panics us. We distrust our own judgment and cling ever closer to Authority.


*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* Some information environments *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
• the intact community: the natural environment is relatively stable, actions have visible consequences, I get responses from my neighbors and from nature, my can adjust to new information
• the built environment: I negotiate by proxy with a rapidly transforming natural world, through corporations and other institutions; consequences are far removed from my actions
• the virtual environment: I can’t keep up with the ever-changing flow of information; there is little past experience that I can use today, and few real-world actions or consequences; I change the channel when I’m bored; I can’t learn from experience
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Think about the drug wars-- that is to say, the war on low income people, especially young black men here and farmers in Asia and Latin America. We jail hundreds of thousands for taking or dealing a few demonized drugs while the society as a whole plunges ever deeper into its corporate-sponsored drug binge. The drug laws do effectively terrorize low income communities, but in terms of their stated goals, they are an outrageous waste and undeniable failure. They are also apparently invisible to the corporate media. Where’s the debate, even on the left? Certainly there are terrific investigators with forceful critiques of the drug war, the prison boom, the “family values” that criminalize our children --all the mantras of submission-- but when repeating something ten times makes it ten times more credible, the politicians, preachers and drug lords have all the ammo. Most of us accept this gaping sore with as little remark as a rainy day in April.

Crime issues in general reflect a similar split between our perceptions and true rates of occurence. The convenience store killing on the six o’clock news makes us want to lock the doors and never venture out, no matter that we’ve always felt safe in our own neighborhoods.

In the world of mass media, a small section of society can surround us with their version of the world, and we have less chance than ever of checking first hand, of finding an independent source. Fascism is almost by definition a product of mass media, but we don’t need state control to lose touch with reality. It’s no wonder so many people distrust the mass media. But many issues don’t directly affect us, and we don’t have independent knowledge about them. Because our minds are geared to making sense of input from the natural world, we can easily misinterpret automated signals as true and important.

# In a world without automated media, frequency and intensity is a fair approximation to a signal’s importance. If my guts hurt a lot for a long period of time, I can reasonably guess I’ve got a serious illness. If there’s a lot of rain I better keep my eyes on the river levels. The fact that I can find some Disney character on the back of cereal boxes, in fast food meals, in ice-skating spectaculars, in the dollar bins at the thrift store, on TV as well as at the movies tells me little about its significance.

# In a world without automated media, repetition usually signifies multiple independent sources, implying a greater chance of accuracy. If I’m walking in a field on a summer’s night and the noise of frogs and crickets sounds like the roar of the ocean, I can tell there’s a lot of critters around. If a lot of my neighbors lose their jobs, I feel pretty sure the local economy’s doing poorly.


By contrast, wide sampling is not necessarily or even frequently the case in the information age. In 2003 Halliburton kept up a drumbeat of reports about threats from Saddam, and only later did most people learn these reports came from the same few discredited sources. But pack journalism, where reporters and their bosses find it easier and less risky to repeat each others’ stories, no matter how in/credible the original source might be, can do just as good a job as lying presidents. Do you remember how for years liberal and conservative newspapers alike repeated the falsehood that Reagan was one of the most popular presidents? The internet seems to have accelerated the pace at which a rumor zooms around the world and comes back as “fact”. It must be true: we’ve seen it all over the web.

. . . repeated exposure to a name, symbol, or nonsense syllable is enough to make a person feel more favorable toward it. This principle has long been known to governments and advertisers: Repeat something often enough, even the basest lie, and eventually the public will believe it. The formal name for this phenomenon is the validity effect.” Experiments showed that “Mere repetition increased the perception that the familiar statements were true. . . . ‘Note that no attempt has been made to persuade . . . . No supporting arguments are offered. We just have subjects rate the statements. Mere repetition seems to increase rated validity. This is scary’” (Wade, Tavris 1993 p. 651).

These automated messages can overwhelm what our own eyes tell us. For years Germans looked at each other and the runty, dark-haired Adolf, and by all accounts saw the Aryan race of tall blonde “Nordics”. Talk radio continues to pound the pulpit about the hoax of climate change, in the face of this decade’s series of weather disasters. Your neighbor is stupid. Your corporation is your family. Someone will fix it later. Stop complaining.


# As institutions standardize communications, we lose the richness of meaning of stories that can be retold and interpreted in many ways. That’s religious writer Harvey Cox’ argument:

Stories depend for their zest on eccentricity, hyperbole and local color. Signals must be clear, and their clarity requires the paring away of all extrinsic data. Jokes are stories. They convey multiple layers of information all at once and can be told and interpreted in several different ways. Traffic lights are signals. They transmit one unequivocal message and discourage all but one response. . . . All societies need both stories and signals. Large societies like ours especially need both the autonomous activities people engage in without anyone else's planning these activities and also the impersonal procedures that make possible the constant flow of ideas, goods and persons. . . . The problem, however, is one of proportion, and what has happened in most modern societies in recent decades represents an ugly distortion of the symmetry that should obtain between story and signal, between people's faith and clerical religion. . . . The swamping of stories by signals concerns me because I think something fundamental is at stake. Although signals multiply in dense, bureaucratically organized cultures, they are actually a less human form of communication. Animal language consists almost entirely of signals-- the screech, the bark, the howl-- but human beings are storytellers, and without stories we would not be human. Through our stories we assemble our pasts, place ourselves in a present and cast a hope for the future. Without stories we would be bereft of memory or anticipation. We know we are something more than mere hairless bipeds, because of our parables, jokes, sagas, fairy tales, myths, fables, epics and yarns. Not only have we created unnumerable stories, we have also found endless ways to recount them. We dance them, draw them, mime them with masks and carve them on rocks. We sing them around tables . . . Religion should be the seedbed and spawning ground of stories. But today religion is not fulfilling its storytelling role (10-12).

The spread of two-way internet access may help us reverse this dynamic, as we add to, transform or subvert official messages.


# By overwhelming us with information, the media machines distract us from key issues. And the less attention we can give to an issue, the more likely we will be to let ourselves be bamboozled.

Psychologists suggest that we process information in two main ways:

Persuasion is said to follow the central route when the individual responds to substantive information about the issue under consideration. . . .
Persuasion is said to follow the peripheral route when the individual responds instead to noncontent cues in a communication (such as the sheer number of arguments it contains) or to cues in the communication context (such as the credibility of the communicator or the pleasantness of the surroundings) (Atkinson 750).

That is, a) we closely investigate the most important questions; and
b) we judge side issues by markers that are only indirectly related to the substance of the information. We have an idea what true and important information should look like and where it should hang out, and if we don’t have enough time to check out the information, we’ll accept it or reject on the basis of these contextual clues. This worked well in our ancestors’ world; they scanned the periphery quickly, looking only for a few signs of hazard or opportunity; this freed up most of their attention to focus on what was most immediate and important.

According to one recent theory, when we are unwilling or unable to process the content of a communication, we may utilize simple rules of thumb --called heuristics-- to infer the validity of its arguments. Examples of such rules might include ‘Messages with many arguments are more likely to be valid than messages with few arguments’; ‘Politicians always lie’; or ‘College professors know what they are talkinga bout.’ This is called a heuristic theory of persuasion” (751).

It’s a little like deciding to lend someone money because she’s wearing a suit and tie; she must be a prosperous and respectable citizen. When we’re too busy to compare new information to other sources and to what we already know, automated repetition can serve as the convincing suit and tie.

In our daily life, we see this most often in advertising. It works very well; otherwise, how could they continue to sell Tylenol for twice the cost of the very same ingredients in generic acetimenophen?

I read that astrologers also rely on our penchant for accepting surface markers in lieu of substance when they ask for details of customers. “Many professional astrologers do ask for very detailed data prior to constructing a horoscope, and according to those findings, their diligence is rewarded-- not by more accurate readings, but by clients who believe more strongly in the accuracy of their readings” (Vyse 134-5). There’s not enough at stake for most customers to ask how the astrologers actually use the details, or if they use them at all. But the questioning process, so similar to what we experience when we apply for a loan or a social service, conforms to our expectation about what a good astrologer would need to develop accurate horoscopes.

This two-route model suggests that, “if we really put our minds to it” --if we really pay attention to an issue-- we can cut through the b.s. and judge it on the merits. The trouble is, by the time the issue rises to the top of our priority list, we’ve already had our minds made up for us by the sneaky, peripheral-route rules of thumb. As discussed above, initial commitments are generally very hard to change.