Elite Control of Information: Fake News & the Rise of iTribes

Tribal

For a very long time the elite controlled the distribution of information – the news.

First there were religious organizations where priests and scribes created and “published” books.

With the invention of the printing press, secular elites wrestled control from the religious elite.

Newspapers dominated the distribution of “news”. The elite controlled them and thus controlled the masses.

Trains and telegraph appeared and were quickly controlled by the same elites.

The telephone quickly followed and the elites made long distance communication expensive thus limiting its use to the upper classes.

The breakup of AT&T inadvertently lead to both cheaper communication and the spread of the Internet.

Now control of communication was attacked by a different elite population – the technically elite. This group had no strong ties to the old elite and distrusted them. The Internet wealth explosion created a new elite.

Information, “news” to the masses and the old elite quickly became inexpensively available to everyone. Individuals could now observe events and share their experience with many other individuals all across countries and even the world.

Information control was lost.

The technically elite, now massively wealthy, found themselves philosophically aligned with the old elite as they sought to maintain and grow their wealth. The started trying to put the information back in an elite controlled bottle.

Meanwhile, the masses had discovered power in sharing information. Social Media began to re-purpose. Individuals suddenly found their voice could compete with the wealthy elite.

Information control is not just about how “loud” the voice is it is also about how prevalent it is.  As other voices rise up the elite voice becomes less powerful regardless of how loud it is.

The old solution of channel ownership, book publishing, newspapers, long line telegraph and telephone, radio stations and TV channels was applied: Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Bing etc.
ISPs control via cable systems was not defendable against cheap competition.

A solution to this problem is to silence those competing voices. Banning Twitter and Facebook users, blacklisting websites and bloggers and the like works but competing channels rapidly arise.

Another solution is to “jam the channel”. Bots, fake news generators, fake user accounts, all seek to overwhelm the recipients/consumers of “news”. Initial attempts to counter these efforts by responding to them and adding more information actually added to the "jam". By filling the communication channel with more “information” individual users have difficulty absorbing any of it.

Individuals quickly responded by blocking some of these extraneous voices, filtering their email, simply not visiting “news” websites, stop watching MSM, blocking bots, and cutting the cable.

One negative consequence of this response is to drive individuals into isolated groups. This is a new form of tribalism – iTribes. Information tribalism is a simplistic response to an overwhelming amount of Internet information. It works like tribalism has always worked: Tribalism reduces stress, reinforces beliefs, creates a sense of family, and constantly/consistently feeds a particular world view. The individual equivalence of the political echo chamber.

I’ll leave a discussion of the effects of such tribal behavior in general to another time. Instead I want to consider how iTribes effect decision making and how they respond to jamming the channel.

Psychologist have studied decision making from the discipline’s beginning. The literature is huge and contains many, tho oft ignored, pithy findings. A follow on blog post will address iTribes and Decision Making.

Also more to come on the elite intentionally “jamming the channel” to cause confusion and poor decision making: iTribes and Jamming the Channel.

Come back in a bit and read these blogs.