Manipulative Information and the Digitized World

In our modern digital age information is collected and absorbed at a rate where it has become difficult to tell apart what's true, an exaggeration, a parody, or completely false. The way we take in our information is an extremely important process that I fear people have chosen to ignore. Too often do I see people reading the headlines of news articles but never actually reading the full article or doing extra research to prove or disprove a point. We are complicit with hermiting inside our gated communities too afraid to challenge our beliefs in the fear that we might be wrong; cherry picking information that supports our beliefs but ignoring the ones that support the other. Everybody does this, some are better than others, but we’re scared of being wrong because some of these beliefs are ones that you hold on to most of your life and we are terrified of accepting the fact that we might have been believing a lie our entire life.

Another thing I’m worried about is the excess of ‘junk data’. Celebrity love lifes, quirky corporations, convenient halve-truths, trivial issues; all used to dumb down and distract people from the bigger picture. We’ve grown accustomed to living under this system, learning the same controlling rhetoric, “respect authority” “speak when spoken to” “because I said so”, all terms used to undermine free thinking and to protect the social hierarchy. It’s a never ending cycle of the older generation telling the younger generation what to do, the younger generation grows into the older generation, they realize that they now have power over the new generation, and ouroboros continues to eat it’s own tail.

How we consume information and what’s in it is important, but the way it’s passed down is just as interesting. Information is not unlike genes, passed down from generation to generation through words, pictures, symbols, and other media. The collective whole is selected and processed, to be passed on. The term for this was coined by Richerd Darkins in 1979, memes. Ironically, the best way to describe memes is to use it as an example of itself; this fascinating and beautiful concept has been twisted and changed over time to create a new meaning, a perfect showing of information evolving as it’s being passed down. But who decides how information is passed down? Do we as people simply accept the garbage that's being fed to us? Of course we do. Why worry about complex social issues when you can live a comfortable life doing as you're told and accepting it as how it is, just another cog in the machine.

“The different cardinal truths neither clash nor mesh. No one is invalidated, but nobody is right. Not even natural selection can take place here. The world is being engulfed in ‘truth.’ And this is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper. “ This is a quote from the video game Metal Gear Solid 2, this is spoken by the main antagonist of the game (the plot is too long to explain) who believes that the digital age is creating a world filled with trivial information that slows the progression of human society, and the only way to fix this is to have them control the spread of information. This is very much immoral and  wrong, censoring and taking away people's free will is obviously something that should be detestable. But I bring it up not only because they’re morally wrong but because they were correct in predicting the future. It creates a new perspective when you realize that this game was written in 1999 and it’s a near perfect black mirror of our current lives.

What do we do? How do we stop ourselves from becoming pawns in someone else's chess game? I don’t know, not yet at least, but I’ll try to do something. Many before us have given up and accepted a life of conformity and comfort, but if we want things to change we cannot accept the status quo. Question your own beliefs, actively seek out new ideas, and keep an open mind but don’t be gullible.