Requiem for the Information Age

Thirty years have passed since the Information Age ended, and we are at last in a position to understand why our naive faith in the utility of communications technology proved to be unfounded.

At the beginning of the Information Age, Thoreau famously observed that "We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate." The problem, as it turned out, was exactly the opposite: Maine and Texas had far too much of importance to communicate.

The apex of the Information Age was reached in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. Informative news reports from Vietnam shook public confidence in the advisability and even the morality of American intervention there, and eventually the United States abandoned its South Vietnamese allies. Then in 1974 a flood of information about the involvement of Richard Nixon in organized crime led to his resignation.

The Information Age was turning out to be dangerous. Regardless of whether any individual American supported or did not support Richard Nixon or the armed intervention in Vietnam, he or she experienced a great deal of anguish as a result of the appearance of actual information in the realm of public discourse. The height of the Information Age was a period which scarred the psyche of the United States, and Americans could not have been expected to endure much more of the turmoil which information entailed without enormous harm being done to the Great Republic.

The credit for slaying the dragon of Information goes to Ronald Reagan. By arranging for the passage of legislation favourable to giant media conglomerates, he earned the gratitude of the press, which spent the rest of his two terms treating him as if he were a serious person. Thus the Information Age turned into the Marketing Age in which we now live.

The press quickly deteriorated into a vehicle for the promulgation of press releases. President Reagan's inflation of the national debt was ignored, his complicity in illegal arms deals glossed over, the questionable utility of his armed interventions abroad not even hinted at.

The media mastered their new craft in the Reagan era. Compare, for example, the Watergate scandal to the scandals which led to the impeachment of President Clinton, or the scandal involved in the approval of the appointment of Clarence Thomas to the United States Supreme Court.

Watergate unfolded despite the best efforts of President Nixon to stifle it. The news media were not to be diverted from their job, as they then saw it, of being media for news. By the time Clarence Thomas was nominated to the Supreme Court, though, the news media were no longer interested in news. They showed little interest in aspects of the Thomas affair which would have had Vietnam-era journalists drooling: the failure to hear testimony from the other women who had complained about Thomas's conduct, for example. They were content to take the Thomas hearings as the Republicans meant them to be taken: as a morality play. Justice Thomas was presented simply as the victim of unsubstantiated allegations, the crucial point being that little interest was shown in finding out whether the allegations could be substantiated. A few years later the media followed up on the scandal by printing allegations about Anita Hill which turned out to have been based on mistaken identity.

As George Edge, a contributor to the late website NEW IMPROVED HEAD, has pointed out, the press was effectively diverted by simple stratagems from pursuing serious questions about the actions of President Clinton. By appearing weak on the issue of his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, President Clinton distracted the attention of the press from more serious issues such as the possibility that his staff was used to pay blackmail. Again a simple morality play was staged, and the attention of the public was directed to simple moral issues which the members of the public could resolve to their own personal taste.

In general the Clinton presidency was a masterpiece of marketing. President Clinton failed, for example, to keep the most important promise he made in his first campaign, to reform public health care. He did, however, come up with a plan to reform public health care, one which was unnecessarily complex and completely impractical, and this plan was presented as if it were a major public policy initiative. President Clinton was very successful in presenting his failures as the result of sabotage by the Republicans. In fact the Republicans did often try to sabotage his plans, but that supposedly is what democracy is about. If you make it easy for your opponents to sabotage your initiatives, questions might be raised about your motives in doing so, but none were raised by the media, which by the 1990s were firmly established in a marketing orientation.

After Mr. Clinton, of course, we had the spectacle of George W. Bush being presented as a great President. Even in relative terms this assertion is difficult to support. In my lifetime alone the Presidents of the United States have included Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Lyndon B. Johnson, three men whose accomplishments dwarf any that George W. Bush could even think up to fantasize about as he drifts off to sleep.

President Bush Jr. understood marketing, though, or he knew someone who understood it. He quickly responded to the terrorist attacks by attributing them to a single demonic person whom he pledged to bring to justice, much as the stars of the World Wrestling Federation pledge to bring their enemies to justice. America seems to be no safer against terrorism now than it was on September 11, 2001 (President Bush even managed to lose a city in his second term), but the American people were united around their leader for a good part of his term.

Of course, these developments are not confined to the United States. The rest of the world, which never had as open a press as the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, could adopt the new approach even more easily than the American media. In the United Kingdom, for example, where the press was more interested in presenting Margaret Thatcher as a moral figure than as a political one (luckily for her, she thought she was a moral figure rather than a political one), the new role of the press as a vehicle for the simplified morality and sensation-mongering of the press release seemed a more natural development than it had in America.

And for all this we can be thankful. If the Information Age had not been done away with, it is doubtful if any American president would finish his term. Wars would be impossible to wage. The conduct of public affairs by our leaders would in effect cease.

For example, if President Johnson had decided to use military tribunals to try protesters against American actions in Vietnam, the press of the day would have gone for his throat. People would have been in the streets, even more riots would have taken place. President Bush's plans to use military tribunals could not elicit even a raised eyebrow from the media. Power is back where it belongs, in the hands of the powerful. Information no longer retains the power to destabilize the most powerful societies on earth, because information no longer exists.

Requiem for the Information Age © 2001, 2010, John FitzGerald

The truth cult

For much of its history human beings have taken part in rituals in which an authority informs other people of what is supposed to be the Truth. I call this the pulpit model of information. For centuries Europeans went to church and an authority got up in the pulpit and told them what to believe about the world (and other places).

This model was later adopted by the schools, no doubt because the schools were established by churches. Whatever the reason, schooling until recently consisted of listening to an authority tell you what to believe about the world (in universities, it still often consists of this). In school, though, you were even tested to make sure you’d learned the approved view of things.

In school you also acquire the idea that Truth is something that can be found on the printed page. Consequently we come to accept something that has been published as true, without verifying that it is.

It’s not surprising that we come to look on the truth as something that is dispensed by authorities. Consequently, we look around for people who look like authorities, and treat what they say as information. Furthermore, we treat the methods they use to come up with things to say as methods that can be used to define information. We are often wrong.

Given the track record of authorities (remember all those biological weapons that, according to authorities, Iraq was just itching to use against the West?), depending on them to tell us the truth is a questionable approach. Another problem with this approach is that there is considerable doubt as to whether we need to know the truth, anyway.

Here’s something that’s true: Churchill, Manitoba, is named for John Churchill, first governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company. That’s a fact. Despite being a fact, though, it doesn’t help me get served when I drop in to the local branch of his company.

Every day we are bombarded with truths. The newspaper tells us things like what the temperature was yesterday in Beijing and what celebrities have (or had) their birthdays today. I remember once reading in the paper that it was the late Alfred Hitchcock’s birthday and thinking “I can’t really send him a card, can I?”

Better than mere truth is information. Information is confused with many things that are not informative, though.

Facts, as we have just seen, are not necessarily informative. Unless I’ve made a bet about what the high temperature in Beijing was going to be, that fact cannot be said to inform me of anything.

Furthermore, many items of information are not factual. The idea of intelligence, for example, cannot be said to be a fact, since there is widespread disagreement about just what intelligence is. However, the concept of intelligence is informative because in speculating about it we discover useful things. We have even discovered some of the shortcomings of the idea of intelligence.

As we have also seen, authoritative statements are not necessarily informative. Another reason they're not necessarily informative is that they disagree with each other. In fact, many of them work according to decision models which encourage disagreement as a way of establishing crucial issues that need to be tested. Courts of English law, for example, require two or more highly trained professionals to argue for exactly opposite points.

People also often assume that a logically sound argument is informative. However, it need not be. We can reason as soundly as it’s possible to reason and still be wrong.

Deductive reasoning starts with a general premise or principle. It then applies that premise to a specific piece of evidence and draws a conclusion about that piece of evidence. For example, we might reason like this:

• All Canadians are British subjects. (general principle)
  
• John FitzGerald is a Canadian. (evidence)
  
• Therefore, John FitzGerald is a British subject. (conclusion)

Well, that conclusion is true. However, let’s suppose we reason like this:

• All Canadians have French first names.
  
• John FitzGerald’s first name is not French.
  
• Therefore, John FitzGerald is not a Canadian.

That conclusion is not true, although the reasoning is entirely sound. Since my first name is not French, the conclusion that I am not Canadian follows logically from the general principle that all Canadians have French first names. The problem, of course, is that the general principle is wrong. Consequently, all statements that follow logically from it are most likely to be wrong. That example is a bit artificial, but people draw sound conclusions from erroneous premises all the time.

For example, many people reasoned out thoroughly logical arguments that on January 1, 2000 the world would be thrown into chaos. I say their beliefs were serious because they acted on them. They stockpiled food, for example, they bought portable electric generators, and some even created fortified shelters to protect themselves from people who hadn’t stockpiled food or bought generators.

As we saw on January 1, 2000, though, the computers didn’t fail. Some of the premises in those thoroughly logical arguments had been unsound. Logic is a tool. Logic does not guarantee that your arguments will stand up any more than a hammer guarantees that the bookcase you build with it will stand up.

Information is often confused with consensus. The supposed existence of a consensus among scientists about global warming is supposed to imply that the consensus opinion is highly likely to be true. Well, a hundred years ago a consensus of scientists would have told you that other races were inferior to whites.

The issue of consensus about global warming seems to have been raised initially as a red herring. That is, people argued against taking action against global warming because there was no scientific consensus about what caused it.

However, consensus has nothing to do with it. At one time there was a scientific consensus that the sun revolved around the earth. That point seems to have escaped the people who are opposed to taking action against global warming, though. Now they complain that this consensus they considered so desirable is being forced on them.

What is informative about an idea is its ability to predict events. The chief value of consensus seems to be coming up with a plan that everyone, or at least everyone important, is willing to go along with. To me, that seems a lot like what lemmings do.

Information cannot be defined by its source. If an expert meteorologist says tomorrow will be sunny, clouds don’t decide to go somewhere else just because a respected source says they will. Information is defined by its effect. Information increases the probability that we will act in effective ways. If it never rains on days when the weather forecast calls for rain, you’re going to end up lugging around a useless umbrella. If it always rains on days your bunions hurt, though, your bunions are a mine of information.

The Truth Cult © 2007, John FitzGerald

The myth of useless information

We are told that we live in an Information Age. If we do, though, we are remarkably uninformed. In fact, most people don’t know what information is. They routinely confuse it with data. Collecting data is described as collecting information, for example.

People noticed that researchers collect data and extract information from it, so they concluded that if they collected data, they’d be able to extract information from it, too. However, they might as well think that since Wayne Gretzky won the National Hockey League scoring championship by putting on some skates and carrying a hockey stick, they can win the NHL scoring championship if they also put on some skates and pick up a hockey stick.

Here is a simple example that illustrates the difference between data and information. A few years ago I was out of town on business. I had never been to the city I was visiting before, so I bought a map of it. The map had been published as recently as three years before, but failed to show a major street that, I was informed, had been opened five years or so before that. The street was the street on which my clients had their office.

To become information, data must at the very least be accurate and relevant. My map failed on both counts. If information is not accurate, it cannot be relevant. Obviously, if a city map does not contain a major street it cannot be valid. A map of London that omitted Trafalgar Square would simply not be a map of London.

Even if information is accurate, though, it need not be relevant. An accurate map of Detroit is not relevant to you if you are trying to find your way around Minneapolis. That point may seem irrelevant itself, but too often people trying to interpret data are performing the equivalent of trying to find their way around Minneapolis with a map of Disneyland.

For example, people often assume that opinions and other ideas predict behaviour, so that instead of observing the behaviour of the people they are interested in understanding, they need only collect their ideas. This assumption is often wrong. For example, students' educational aspirations often are unrelated to how far they end up going in school.

In general:

1. If you need to know what the capital of Ontario is, and you consult an encyclopedia that tells you the capital of Ontario is Toronto, the encyclopedia is informative (since Toronto is, in fact, the capital of Ontario).
   
2. If you need to know what the capital of Ontario is, and you consult a different encyclopedia that tells you the capital is Ottawa, that encyclopedia is not informative (Ottawa is the capital of Canada, but not of Ontario).
   
3. If you don’t need to know what the capital of Ontario is, then neither encyclopedia is informative, since you’re not going to be consulting either one. An aspirin you don’t take won’t make your headache go away.

Information is conventionally defined as data that reduce uncertainty, and the preceding three rules are consistent with this definition:

1. If you’re uncertain about where the capital city of Toronto is, then an encyclopedia that tells you the capital is Toronto has reduced your uncertainty to zero – you know what the capital is.
   
2. An encyclopedia that tells you the capital is Ottawa hasn’t reduced your uncertainty at all, even though you may think it has.
   
3. And if the question of the capital of Ontario is of no interest to you (because, for example, you already know what it is, or you don’t need to know what it is)), you’re not going to consult either encyclopedia, so neither of them will reduce your uncertainty about where Toronto is.

What these observations boil down to is a definition of information as:

1. necessary,
   
2. accurate, and
   
3. intelligible.

Data may be unnecessary for two reasons:

1. you have no reason to consult them, or
   
2. they tell you nothing about the subject you’re interested in.

Consequently, if data are not accurate they are not necessary, either. If you want to know who won the hockey game last night you don’t ask someone to guess who won. Instead you go to a reliable source. Even accurate data are unnecessary, though, if you don’t need to know them. If you’re not a hockey fan, you don’t subscribe to the Hockey News.

There is no such thing as useless information.

The Myth of Useless Information © John FitzGerald, 2008