Crap In, Crap Out: The problem with context-free junk-information and what we can do about it
Time to dig in...
If you look at casual political communication and even some ramblings by political junkies, squint hard and you will notice that we have a context problem. The problem is not that we use the wrong context to understand things, but that many of us don’t use context at all. We read or hear of an event, statement, or quote and go no further: What we have just read or heard is what we take in and regurgitate. Unless context is provided for us, at best we have a surface level understanding of things (worse, if we only read headlines and ledes).
Context is essential to understand things. It sets the story by giving us time, place, backstories, history, geography, scientific data, psychological insight, and more. Context is the difference between “A man walks in the room” and “A man walks into the room, worried about being pursued by starving bears who caught a whiff of his new perfume Ode d’ Honey.” In the political world, a world where decisions about people’s lives are made, context is everything.
Though we have many resources to use to establish context, much more than in pre-digital world, many people don't know these resources exist, don’t know how to use or reference them resources to establish, don’t understand how to put things into context, and/or are so overwhelmed by life and information that they freeze and never consider context.
Certainly, the internet makes it seem like everything in the world is coming fast at us all at once. Politically, Trump's franticness and instability, as well as Steve Bannon’s “Flood the Zone…” shit-information attack supercharges this perception. And while Trump is very loud and we are getting a lot of shit thrown at us, the “world speeding up” is more mind stuff than real.
Mind stuff? Yeah! I reflect back at when I was part of a group of Sacramento young’uns organizing against George H.W. Bush’s Gulf War. We were heavily invested in keeping that war from happening. We spent every day immersed in news, as much news as we get now but coming from what seemed to be a smaller number of outlets. We were reading news stories, position papers, academic reports, history books, and a lot of Noam Chomsky. We listened to tapes of speeches and lectures, as well as interviews on community and public radio. We were feeling high emotions. A lot was coming at us fast and it was very intense. However, for the most part, it felt like we had a handle on things, especially our perceptions. Why?
A few things:
It didn't seem like all information in the world was thrown at us at once, a common perception today, and a faulty one. Sure, digital has made it possible to present and access a lot of information, but we are limited by time and our capacity to hold and understand information. We can only consume what we are able to consume, and that is fine! Understand this and it’s not crazy to suggest that we have as much useful information at our disposal back in the analog world as we do now.
Both the digital and analog worlds go at the pace we set; however, the digital world has a capacity for speed that is near endless, which gives us the perception that everything is too fast and out of our control. Not true. Aside from natural processes like aging, we mostly control the pace of our lives, especially when it comes to consumption. We also control how fast or slow, how much or how little, information we process.
In the analog world, we build our pile of information at a self-imposed pace that allows us to consume things as they come, something we can do in the digital world with proper discipline, a thing that many of us haven’t learned. Too often, with digital we act as if we entered an all-you-can-eat buffet and panic because we don’t understand how we can eat all the food available!
Politically, it is much louder today than it was back when. While loudness has always been used as a phycological weapon to confuse, frustrate, and wear us out, because the loudness tactic wasn’t used constantly in the pre-digital/pre-Trump world, it was easier to identify it as a tactic, which makes it easier to identify the tactic as extracurricular and not in the norm of everyday life. By identifying the tactic as such, loudness (or any tactic) is understood as a tactic and not life. Loudness is nothing more than loud…and anyone can get loud.
Back to the pace of analog information: In analog, we gathering information was a deliberate act, one we felt control over. We gathered info and then paused to reflect on what we discovered. Sometimes, we had to wait for information to come, which made us step back and either analyze what we found or do something else. We used downtime to do non-political stuff both by ourselves, with people outside our political chat groups, and, very important, together with people in physical spaces. That downtime allowed our Gulf War activist group to meld into a community, one that got together because of politics but was also about food, music, sex, etc. Our community helped give us sustenance and served as a safety net. It made us thrive as activists and in life.
Finally, in the analog world, we were not sequestered behind screens. We had computers for sure, but they were big bulky things that we left at work or at home. We didn’t have a pocket computer or social media or virtual communities. Everything was “real life.” We talked with each other one on one and in groups, but always face to face. We shared space, which means we shared experiences. With shared experience we created bonds. Shared experience also gave us shared reference points and a common language. Back then, the phrase “alternative facts” would have sounded so absurd that it would be marginalized to the world of cattle decapitations and alien anal probing.
We were fortunate that the analog world was where all of the above happened almost de facto. We didn't have to work much to get perspective, though there were times we had to check ourselves but it wasn't every day or hour. And because we had no option other than to physically meet together and needed to eat, we could interject politics with simple pleasures of life, something that was nurturing.
The good news is that the immediacy of digital is a human-created idea, one that we do not have to accept. Sure, “everything is there right now,” but we don’t have to be gluttons or speed demons. We are still capable of slowing things down to a human pace, which gives us a bit more perspective and room to find context. I know this because it is a challenge every journalist faces. More than most people, we deal with finding, analyzing, and disseminating information that comes from innumerable sources, and we do it on deadline. We have to develop a discipline around information, otherwise we’d drown in shit.
Every journalist also understands the importance of ranking information, identifying what info is solid and useful and what is essentially nutrition-free. Much of not most political "information" is junk food. Junk info is tasty is a very crude sense, like a potato chip where the salt overwhelms everything or a candy bar that just tastes sweet, but it is nutrition-free. Eating a bag of chips thrills the taste buds and fill the stomach, but the taste is one-dimensional and the feeling of fullness comes with no energy boost, in fact the opposite.
Like junk food, junk information makes us sluggish, a sign from our body that what we are consuming is not good for us. Just as junk food lowers the defenses that keep illness at bay and harms us with clogged arteries and higher risks for cancer, junk information fills our minds full of crap, which muddles our thoughts and warps our decision making. Crap in, crap out. But we keep consuming junk because it’s comfortable, seemingly easy, and demands nothing from us up front (but comes with a big cost later). And, for a while, we feel fulfilled.
Note that I wrote "seemingly easy," because, in reality, junk consumption has very bad long-term consequences. Instead of heart trouble, cancer, obesity, fatigue, and brain fog. With junk information, we get a sense of knowing that isn't fact-based, ask the wrong questions, make bad decisions, experience mental fatigue, and are subject to brain fog. When all that runs into the real world, we either fuck up or freeze not knowing what to do. Either way, frustration sinks, which invites cynicism.
Fitness freaks who focus on diet often talk about "clean burning fuel." We need the equivalent for information. As with a healthy diet, to get a good intellectual diet takes some effort. Most of that effort is "simply" realizing what is good for you and what is not and changing your dietary behavior and creating new habits. I don't think it takes much to figure out what is good and bad, especially when there are people - experts - who can point that out and/or provide "good food." Creating new habits is not that difficult either, if you know what new habits to cultivate. The hard part is change.
Quite a while ago, I had a life-threatening emergency due to a couple infected kidney stones. After the emergency passed, my urologist told me that I had to change my diet to mostly avoid oxalates, which come from foods rich in calcium. What foods? Milk, yogurt, and cheese, of course, but also berries, black pepper, spinach, most nuts, peanut butter, etc. - basically the main things in my vegetarian diet! When I went home and pulled up the do’s and don't’s of a low oxalate diet, I freaked the fuck out. "What the hell am I going to eat? Will I have to eat meat to get my protein?"
Reality: There's a lot that I could eat and, as soon as I lowered my oxalate intake and see no kidney stones after a year, I could start introducing nuts, berries, and other foods. As far as eating meat, yeah, probably so, but no need to eat meat all day, every day. A couple meals a week is fine. So, after I got over my fears, I changed my diet, which opened me up to new foods and challenged me as a cook. I stopped getting stones, my energy level shot up, and I felt healthier. The change wasn't just needed, it was good for me. Not only was it much easier than I feared, I got to eat BBQ ribs again, which was a bonus.
The question now is: If there is a clear way to get good information, if the challenge is identifying the info and creating healthy habits, and if change is a matter of overcoming fear and exerting will power, there still remains the problem of our current crisis of mass stupidity. How do we de-stupify everyone?
The answer: We don't and we don't have to. Politically, most people cruise through life as spectators, voting once or twice every four years, if at all. It would be great if they participated more, but only if they are not consuming junk info. If they are hooked on junk, let them participate minimally or not at all. Sure, try to educate, but don't force it. As anyone who has done therapy knows, forcing doesn't work and often makes people dig in, doubling down on their ignorance.
Forget the willfully ignorant. Instead work to expand numbers with people who are starved for and are open to good info. Some of that comes with "just" communicating in plain, jargon-free language. Part of that identifying good and bad, while giving people the tools to identify that stuff themselves. Finally, it is essential that we get from behind our screens and meet together in the real world, in physical spaces. We must make make it a priority to build community, an act which the “other side” works hard to prevent happening. Solidarity.