Informational Biases

It has never been easier to get your viewpoint across to other people. The cost and ease of publishing your thoughts online are low and getting lower all the time. We should be the most widely knowledgeable generation ever. We have the means to assimilate multiple points of view on any issue and reach an informed conclusion regarding any current or past issue. But there is a problem with the way we access the information and points of view on the Net. All of us have biases. We tend to favor some opinions over others.

For example, for many around the world, the US is a bogeyman whose actions are always suspect and who can do no right. For many others particularly Americans, the US is a force for good whose actions are almost always above reproach and who can do no wrong. Each group of people will tend to seek out information that support their particular point of view. In the past, this natural bias did not matter a great deal. The main sources of information for most people were newspapers, TV and to some extent movies. These are passive media in the sense that the decision of which story to carry and which to ignore was decided by someone else for nearly all people. As a result, all of us were individually exposed to alternate points of view. We may not have liked them. We may have considered the people who held such views to be idiots. We may not have read them in detail. But at least we were forced to glance at them and thereby acknowledge their existence and occasionally their relevance. The Net broke this gate-keeping role. Now individuals have the ability to seek out all points of view on their own including ones that the old gatekeepers would filter out.

However, keep in mind that we are all biased as I mentioned above. We naturally tend to seek out opinions that reinforce our current viewpoint. This is a form of validation for us. The Net makes this process easier and easier. The algorithms that power search engines are "learning" algorithms. They try to predict what an individual would like to view based on his or her past viewing habit. Since we tend to view like minded opinions and information that validates our current views more than others, over time we will only be shown such opinions and information by them. Other opposing or even different opinions and information will get filtered out. The real problem is that we will not even realize that this filtering is taking place. Search engines and social media sites are the gateways through which we enter the Net. We trust that they will retrieve the most relevant information for us out of this vast sea. That is exactly what they try to do. But the information they retrieve reflects our biases. Entire goldmines are effectively shut out of our view and we don't even know it.

A question arises over here: is this a relevant issue or is this being like the boy who cried wolf too many times? I think this is not just a relevant issue, it is a very important issue. When we restrict ourselves to one particular set of information or a particular point of view, we are actually making ourselves less informed and less knowledgeable. We will be missing information that will give us a more holistic view of our surroundings. We will easily end up missing trends and information that can help us socially and economically. Our personal development becomes stunted and instead of growing mentally, we will shrink instead holding ever narrower and more prejudiced opinions and views which over time will be less and less relevant to our surroundings.

In addition, society will suffer. People in the same country will easily end up living in separate versions of reality. Physically they will be living together; mentally they will be universes apart. Already we see this trend in the US where liberals and conservatives seem to be living in separate worlds despite living in the same country. This has had political repercussions. A major strength of American democracy was the ability of people with different points of view to sit together and come up with joint solutions to problems. Neither side may have been happy but at least progress was made. Today, such political compromises have become extremely difficult resulting in deadlocks and paralysis. This has strong repercussions economically. Socially, people are increasingly inhabiting separate bubbles. They will know what is happening inside their particular bubble but will be unaware of what is happening elsewhere. This results in a weakening of the bonds that holds society together.

The Internet holds the promise of connecting everyone on the planet in a fashion that was simply not possible before. Not only that, it is a vast and expanding repository of information and knowledge. What used to be locked away in books and other offline media is now being put on the Net. New ways of finding and making sense of this information are being developed. Most new technologies are incremental. They allow us to do what we used to do in a better or faster (often both) fashion. The Net on the other hand is transformational. It will change the way we interact with each other and make possible new cultural, scientific and economic forms. It will be very unfortunate if we were unable to take full advantage of this because of our biases. As individuals and as a society, we will be all the poorer.

Related articles

• Internet Isolationism (reelslow.wordpress.com)
• The Filter Bubble (flyingpenguin.com)
• Beware online "filter bubbles": Eli Pariser on TED.com (ted.com)
• Your internet is wrong! Beware of online "filter bubbles" - TED video of Eli Pariser (socialwayne.com)
• Who Decides What You Read? Hint: It's Not You (bigthink.com)

Perceptions

Nobody in the world views the world as it actually is. All of us have filters in place designed to eliminate unwanted information. Without these filters, we would all suffer from massive and literal information overload. So we learn to ignore what is unimportant and focus on what is important. Doing so was literally a matter of life and death in the past. Hunter-gatherers need to be able to distinguish between the important and the unimportant. This represents the difference between having lunch and being lunch.

In the modern information age, the value and importance of these filters has increased enormously. We are inundated in an ocean of data points most of which are irrelevant to our situation and needs. The problem is that we are not attuned to this new era of always on, always available information. As a result our mental filters are not yet fully in place. They let in too much information which seems important but is actually not. So our email boxes are overflowing with emails that we will never read again and indeed will forget about. We buy books because they seem important to our self development but actually are not. We read reports that may contain information that we think we may need. Six months later we discover that we have never used that information.

The filters that we create and use give each of us different points of view of the same outside inputs. Thus each of us creates unique points of view that seem real and objective to us when as a matter of fact they are anything but.

Related articles

• It's not information overload... it's filter failure." (michaelgarner.wordpress.com)
• Are you stuffing yourself with junk information? (theorganizedexecutiveblog.com)

Controlling Information - II

There is an aspect of controlling information that is not often recognized. It is a reflection of the way in which most governments tend to view their citizens. Most of us think of ourselves as rational beings with the ability to differentiate between right and wrong and decide for ourselves what is the best course of action to take in any given situation. However, governments have a tendency to view us as essentially children in need of guidance. This is a very basic albeit unarticulated justification of secrecy which lies behind controlling information.

A question that can be asked at this point is so what if information is controlled in some fashion? Surely some level of secrecy is desirable at various levels. So long as most information is in the public, does it matter is some is hidden for some time. Good questions to which my answer is that it matters a great deal.

Controlling information has several aspects. One is the secrecy element which has been touched upon previously. Another element is distortion. Information can be hidden not just by hiding it but also by distorting it so that the general public's understanding is different from that of the "insiders". A prime example is the invasion of Iraq. Information was not really hidden in the run up to the war. Instead it was distorted so that most Americans got the (completely false) impression that Iraq was closely connected with the events of 9/11. In a much cruder fashion, the Arab dictatorships that are facing popular revolt are engaged in the same game. They seek to paint the uprising with the brush of Al Qaeda without presenting any proof of the alleged connection.

Distortion is also carried out by non government actors. These include think tanks, agenda driven NGOs, corporations and rich individuals. For a long time, the tobacco industry presented distorted information downplaying the risks of smoking. In recent times, Big Oil has been downplaying the risks of global warming by presenting distorted (and sometimes outright false) information. They seek to give an impression that the science behind global warming is still in doubt even though the overwhelming majority of scientists have been talking and writing about the same for a long time now. The objective over here is to prevent change and create conditions for business as usual to carry on for the sake of short term profits.

The result of controlling information can be disastrous for individuals and societies. The invasion of Iraq and the subsequent uprising resulted in large numbers of men being killed. This left hundreds of households where suddenly women had to become providers in an atmosphere of high insecurity. Not surprisingly, there was an upsurge in prostitution as these women sought to make ends meet in a hostile environment. The denial campaign led by the tobacco companies resulted in a large number of tobacco related deaths that could otherwise have been prevented. Global warming is already affecting and will continue to affect millions of people. There will almost certainly be a huge upsurge in refugees. Already the number of people headed towards the developed countries has resulted in a massive uptick in xenophobia amongst the natives. What will happen when global warming really kicks in? The escalation in tensions that is bound to occur could easily end up in major conflicts which have a high probability of going nuclear.

Controlling information is not just about control. It is also a mind set. It is a thinking that says I know better than anyone else what is good for them as individuals and what is good for us as a society. It treats adults as children who need to be protected. It views most people as being too simple (and yes idiotic) to be given all the information that is relevant to them. Adults are thus unable to make informed decisions and choices regarding themselves and their families. The irony is that the people who seek to control information are too often blindsided by events. They think that they have all the relevant information that is required and then reality rudely interrupts and graphically demonstrates the flaws in their thinking. In the end, we all suffer.

Related articles

• How Serious is the Global Warming Threat? (civicchoices.wordpress.com)
• Global Warming Skeptics Conserve Energy As Much As Believers (usapartisan.com)

Controlling Information

Information is and always has been key to acquiring and holding power. That is why controlling the spread and type of information has been a major priority of all governments down the ages. Giving people access to information has always empowered them while reducing the power of the ruling classes. As new communications technologies came onto the scene, they were gradually subsumed into existing power structures. At first this was done in an obvious manner but over time governments learned to control them behind the scenes. The trick was to convince people that the communication media they relied on was impartial while in actual fact it largely toed the government line.

Take the BBC. Is it impartial? Most people would not hesitate to say yes. But examine it more carefully and it typically acts as an extension of the UK government but never in an obvious manner. News that the government wants spread will receive widespread publicity while events that the government wants de-emphasized will be largely ignored. For example, why is there extensive coverage of Libya which has a ruthless dictator against whom the population are in revolt but we never hear about the protests that have started on a small scale within Saudi Arabia which has a largely self serving ruling tribe? Why is little coverage of the fact that Saudi troops are in Bahrain in an attempt to prevent a populist rebellion that happens to be largely driven by the Shia community?

Governments are not the only ones seeking to influence and control information. Large corporations and rich individuals also seek to do so. Their motivations are more commercial. Corporations seek a constant stream of concessions which are often against the economic interests of the general population. One way of securing these is to highlight the (alleged) benefits that corporations bring to communities while hiding the costs. Thus Walmart will emphasize the jobs that a new store will bring to a community while hiding the medical cost to the community because they pay their workers minimum wages and do not provide medical coverage. Rich individuals often use loopholes within the law to avoid taxes. They control and manipulate information (often indirectly) to the general public in order to avoid possible backlashes.

Military and intelligence services are usually among the most enthusiastic controllers of information. A lot of crimes can be hidden in the name of national security. The best part of this is that whenever national security is invoked, the notion that the country is in danger can be implanted in the minds of the citizens and that immediately becomes an emotive issue.

So information is controlled for a variety of reasons by a variety of forces. Most of these reasons are specious. The whole purpose of controlling information is to keep the general population in a state of ignorance regarding the true state of affairs in any issue. In democratic societies where covert control is not possible, the aim is to provide a superficial and distorted understanding of critical issues whereas autocratic societies can suppress any and all information.