Disinformation Systems

As yet another year has started, technology keeps developing. With ever faster processors and advanced displaying methods, we now live in a world where a constant paradox of information is present: do we have too much information?

Democratic governments brag themselves for having a free press and facilitating access to the information with sounding statements such as the Freedom of Information Act, but the truth is the gun seems to have back-fired. Be careful not to misinterpret me: I’m all in favour of democracy and freedom of information!

Web 2.0… boy, do teachers LOOOOVE to talk about this: the revolutionary capability of people posting information themselves accessible to anyone in the world.. or almost. I doubt most people in China can access this post. But the truth is, this boost of information freedom has actually created an overload on the general public. Take the example of news broadcasters: most of them now use the public to obtain information and pictures from all over the world… for free. They get to chose what information they will then convey on their news programs. And lets be realistic: no one has the time to read every single piece of information available out there, so people usually turn towards these news broadcasters to get a compilation of the relevant information available out there.

The issue here is that, in order to cope with this excess information, people rely on a system that is highly biased: news broadcaster are companies, and as such depend on profits to survive. With the economy in current conditions, the power of such incomes rely on one institution: the Government. The Government and its projects to boost the economy are the ones that currently distribute the real money that funds these news broadcasters’ clients, and as such, if a news broadcaster starts saying things the government doesn’t like, then its clients will move away with fears of loosing this precious government support. The outcome is clear: do we rely get unbiased information? Who actually has the unbiased information and where can we get it? Who has the more “realistic version”?

With the amount of information available online, we should theoretically be able to access any information and to better understand the truth about any given event. But the reality contains two hard to beat issues: First the amount of information available is too huge for one person to have the time to evaluate by himself the reality of the facts: how can we be sure that the information provided is truthful and that the facts have not been duped? And even if one were to say that if many sources have the same information, then this information must be true, the second-hand of the problem blows this theory out the window: most of the information providers rely on the information one-another publishes and act accordingly. If in the end the source comes from the same place, it would be natural to see the same information repeated by the various channels of information.

And then again, here comes the irony of it all… I myself am, through this post, a source of this “information”.

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