How the Internet is freeing conspiracy theories from the control imposed by traditional media
BS
In the pre-Internet age, our society had an order of information in
which knowledge was managed by experts and authorities, as well as
representatives of the political, legal, scientific, medical and
economic powers-that-be. Academics, scientists, spokespersons for the
state and the owners, producers and editors of the major media decided
what was real and what was unreal, what was true and what was false.
The upside of this was that an awful lot of utter nonsense did not
find mainstream distribution. The downside was that some material was
misclassified as unreal or false – either by error, or because of
interest group pressure, ideology or group-think.
The Internet threatens all this by speeding up circulation of
unofficial data and simply bypassing the official information
authorities. Crucially, it enables the creation and distribution of
pure speculation or outright lies without significant legal hazard.
In the pre-Internet ‘knowledge order’, the label ‘conspiracy theory’
was one of the key management tools of the powers-that-be, enabling
the denigration of a political or historical proposition without it
having to be falsified. In the post-1964 sections of Dr Christopher
Andrew’s 1,000-page history of MI5, In Defence of the Realm (Allen
Lane, 2009), Andrew, as the spokesman for MI5, repeatedly dismisses
the claims of critics of the agency as “conspiracy theories”. Based on
the notion of an authority being allowed to see the official records
of a secret agency, to report back that all is well and that the
agency’s critics are simply misinformed or conspiracy theorists,
Andrew’s book looks like one of the last hurrahs of the old
information order.
Elsewhere, though, the new order is lapping at the feet of the old.
The first big breakthrough from the margins of the cybersphere to the
major media in this country was when, on 27 September, the BBC’s
Andrew Marr asked Prime Minister Gordon Brown: “A lot of people in
this country use prescription painkillers and pills to help them get
through. Are you one of them?”
In the furore which followed, it was revealed that Marr had no
evidence other than the “evidence” which lots of other people
(including this writer) had: emails circulating which suggested that
Brown was taking a particular antidepressant. It was the first time in
this country that something so sensitive and potentially damaging had
made its way from the Internet into mainstream TV politics – from
unregulated to regulated screens, as it were.
America is much deeper into the new information order than the UK. On
29 September, Bill Clinton said on American television that the ‘vast
right-wing conspiracy’ – the phrase used by his wife – which had
pursued him through his terms in office had now focused on President
Obama.
Obama is experiencing an extreme version of what happened to Harold
Wilson in the 1960s and 70s: despite being a centrist, he is being
accused of being a Communist (and worse) by the right.
Wilson only had to endure rumour-mongering among London’s financial,
military and intelligence elites, with just hints appearing in the
major print media and nothing on radio or television: the libel laws
and the major media’s demand for evidence prevented the fantasies
about “the Communist cell in No 10” being published or broadcast.
Obama now has the American right’s considerable Internet, TV, radio
and print media cranking away night and day on the themes of his
otherness: his illegitimacy as a presidential candidate because (it is
claimed) he was not born in the US; his hidden Communism and/or
Fascism (example above); his being a secret Muslim; his non-authorship
of his memoir; and his links to Bill Ayers, an American lefty and
member of the Weathermen in the 1969–1974 period. And with the
constitutional right to free speech and the existence of a public
interest defence against libel charges existing in America, there is
little Obama can do about it.
It is a commonplace on the British liberal-left that British libel
laws are too restrictive, too protective of those who can afford the
lawyers. As I was writing this, the Guardian reported that it was
under an injunction not only to not report a story (a question tabled
in Parliament by a Labour MP), it was even under an injunction
preventing it from reporting who the subject of the story was!
Ah, the old information order reasserting itself, I thought. But
within an hour the information the Guardian had been forbidden to
report was on the Net and the injunction collapsed the next day. The
new order with a vengeance!
Faced with a banning injunction, any media organisation can just slip
the story onto the Net. Is the old information order finished? If this
is the major breach it appears to be, do we want to go down the
American road to a situation in which anyone can write or broadcast
anything? For the evidence from America suggests that a large section
of the population are unable to tell the shit from the Shinola. And if
there is a middle way, what is it?
RMJon23
> http://www.forteantimes.com/strangedays/conspiracycorner/2485/the_new...
> Faced with a banning injunction, any media organisation can just slip
> the story onto the Net. Is the old information order finished? If this
> is the major breach it appears to be, do we want to go down the
> American road to a situation in which anyone can write or broadcast
> anything? For the evidence from America suggests that a large section
> of the population are unable to tell the shit from the Shinola. And if
> there is a middle way, what is it?
The middle way seems to reside with a logic that has at minimum, three
values. But I ask far too much of people who cannot tell shit form
Shinola.