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Are we losing the information war?

There is no doubt we are living in what could best be described as the Information Age: industry is receding, and data is the currency. We all have access to information, and with it comes power and freedom. But has this come at a higher cost? This is my submission for this week's #freedomfriday writing prompt initiative, courtesy of @eaglespirit on the Steem blockchain.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Although your mind's opaque
Try thinking more if just for your own sake
The future still looks good
And you've got time to rectify
All the things that you should
— The Beatles

In the affluent areas of the world at least, we are constantly bombarded by information. News cycles are running 24 hours and are no longer confined to print, radio, and TV. We carry around our smart-phones and have entire libraries available at our fingertips. Everywhere we walk in our cities, there are screens showing us anything from TV programs, news headlines, or advertising. Even advertising itself has moved away from simple sales slogans to 'advertorial' — stories or research that provides 'evidence' for why we need that particular product or service. It is relentless. Whereas social media was once a space for intimate social interaction, it has become nothing other than a marketplace for every self-styled guru-preneur trying to influence you for 'likes' and 'follows'. Information is everywhere. It has replaced 'industry' as the currency of our times, and has become a commodity that everyone wants (or thinks they do) and everyone is selling. But that's a good thing, right?

Destroyed by M.T.V.,
I hate to bite the hand that feeds me so much information.
The pressure's on the screen to sell you things that you don't need.
It's too much information for me.
— Duran Duran

Well, yes... and no. I would still argue for the freedom to access information, as it is one of the more important democratising factors in an emerging global society. Throughout history, it can be seen that withholding information has been a tool for tyrants and despots. Consider how much information from the ancient world (Greece and Rome) was hoarded by the Catholic Church for centuries, and how they resisted men of science such as Galileo and Copernicus. Many — if not all — of the revolutions have been fuelled by access to information which inspired and educated the people. Information helps us learn about the world, learn about other people. This is the foundation on which Universities are built. Libraries and databases are store-houses of the collective knowledge and wisdom of our entire species, gathered over millennia. The fact that as we progress through the 21st Century we have come to realise that 'information' is a far better tool that 'bronze', 'iron', and 'industry' shows how we have come along as a civilisation (or conglomerate of multiple civilisations). My questions, and thus my critique of this freedom, are centred around whether we can handle it, and what we may need to consider doing in this very different world we live in today.

Too much information

Too much information running through my brain
Too much information driving me insane
— The Police

In my previous article I wrote about the inherently chaotic nature of human language, and how meaning is co-constructed by the reader. The added piece to this idea is that too much information creates further internal chaos as we struggle to make sense of it all. Many people find it overwhelming to process so much information. According to Bruce Lipton, the conscious mind can process 40 bits of information per second; in NLP that is explained as being the equivalent to about 5-9 things we can pay attention to at once. While the unconscious mind can certainly receive around 500,000x more than that (consider the retina can transmit visual input at at roughly 10 million bits per second, for example), our conscious mind has evolved so we can focus on only a small number of things. What this essentially means is that there is more information being processed than what we are consciously aware of — information which, given the conscious choice, we may not want to receive in the first place. The issue of subliminal messaging becomes an issue of personal consent; do we really have the freedom to choose what to read/hear/think/believe? As a practitioner, I saw the very real effects on patients who were overwhelmed by all of this. Not just patients, but also colleagues; not to mention my own personal experiences with this. People get sick, genuinely.

Information overload

Sometimes I feel like my mind will explode
Sometimes I feel like I've got no control
Sometimes I wish I had a heart made of steel
Sometimes I wish I couldn't feel
— Living Color

There is an explanation from Chinese Medicine for how this affects us at a physiological level. The constant strain of needing to utilise our cognition drains collateral energy from the body, and one of the first sources of this energy is from the digestive system (our brains require more blood and oxygen to help fire neurons). This weakens digestion and metabolism, and can lead to tiredness, fatigue, and a number of other symptoms, which cascade from here. 思 sī (thinking too much, worrying) is one of the internal causes of disease; the prevention of this is to be more physical, and allow decisions to be made from embodied cognition. The overwhelm that comes from information overload can be crippling, and leads to the inability to trust what one is feeling intuitively. A tell-tale sign for me is the desire to get out of the city and into the peace and quiet of the country-side. We can't simply turn everything off however. This is an impractical response, as there are of course massive social benefits to having an informed population. Plus, the genie has been let out of the bottle now... Pandora's Jar has been opened...

Photo by Chuck Hildebrant on Unsplash

Information is like nutrition

Do people really spend millions upon millions
To make us think we care about the planet
At the same time polluting and looting the only world we've got
So they can maximize their profit?
People do...
— Jackson Browne

What we put into our minds is no different to what we put into our stomachs; it should feed and nourish us in a way that helps us thrive. So it makes sense that each of us can make informed choices as to the quality of what information is received. The reality is that in a world where we have info-saturation, there is going to be a whole lot of crap out there, no different to there being junk-foods that have no nutritional quality to it whatsoever. That sugary-sweet stuff will certainly comfort us when we are at an emotional edge, but it won't help the situation, nor will it make the uncomfortable feelings go away. Numbing ourselves with a 'crap diet' of information will only makes us feel crap. In the following clip from the recent season of Marvel's Jessica Jones, Trish Walker has enough of the banality and mediocrity that her career as a vapid radio talk-show host is. The way to becoming more discerning about what we read, see, and hear is to learn and develop your critical thinking skills. Everyone needs to become more information literate, to learn how to interpret, understand, and use information that benefits your own life, and other people's. Now that information is so freely available, we need to learn how to use that information. Like any tool, it can be used for to help or harm others. Critical thinking skills are the ability to analyse the nature of what is said or written. It is checking the source of a piece of information:

who said/wrote it?
what is their background?
what 'qualifies' them to speak about this? (NB: this doesn't need to be a formal qualification)
what evidence do they provide to support their claims?
who is the intended audience for this?
etc...

Another aspect of this skill is in being able to consider the presuppositions of any piece of information. A presupposition in many cases is what is not said; it is what is unspoken and true in order for that piece of information to be true and make sense. Sometimes this is also called "reading between the lines". The idea is to be able to get to the truth of a statement. Here is an example — "Jane is no longer using social media" The presuppositions in this sentence are:

Jane exists
'Social Media' exists
'Social Media' is something that can be used
Jane once used social media
There must be reasons why she used it
There must be reasons why she no longer uses it
and so on....

Having these skills and applying them consciously is what empowers you to be able to make conscious choices about what you will believe or not. It brings back your freedom. Because salespeople, spin doctors, and politicians use language to get into our unconscious minds and control us. Bombarding us with information overwhelms our cognitive control, and allows choices to be made unconsciously. Essentially, they enable and empower you to think for yourself! Is it any wonder that the very institutions and people who teach such skills are under attack in the present day by cultural conservatives? Consider, for example, the presuppositions that may be found in the attacks by certain sectors of the media and government against the humanities and liberal arts, and against courses in philosophy, literature, sociology, and so forth... What, in these attacks, is unspoken? Yes, we have the freedom to information, and information is power. But with great power comes an even greater responsibility on how and when we wield such power.

Who needs information
When you're living in constant fear
Just give me confirmation
There's some way out of here
— Roger Waters

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