With the expansion of the social media and internet use, along with the “24 hour news cycle”, one would expect that we would be increasingly better informed but I am afraid that is not the case. All this technology makes it possible to disseminate false information very quickly and only through a lot of searches of various sources and a lot of analysis can one get to the truths.
The difference between being uninformed and misinformed is that the 60% of Republicans in one of the Carolinas not knowing that Hawaii is a state is an example of being uninformed. 60% of all Republicans believing President Obama to be a Muslim is being misinformed. Which is more dangerous? I believe it is the latter. It is very difficult, though not impossible to manipulate the access to information but so easy to manipulate misinformation to advance specific agendas.
When the new Speaker of the House was asked about the notion being spread and believed by his followers that the President is not a citizen, he replied by saying he can’t influence what people think. That’s a joke because influencing what people think is what politicians excel at. He could have and should have just said that the President was born in Hawaii and is indeed a citizen and the legitimate leader of our country.
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Uninformed or Misinformed
Posted by PoliticAli at 8:21 PM
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2 comments:
Apropos, just the other day I saw someone send out a link via email to a bunch of people that 'referenced' a post on someone's facebook page as if it were some kind of newsworthy post. People went on to discuss the issue and what was said in the post without ever stopping to question whether the source should be considered reliable.
Personally I am not surprised the speaker said what he did. Politics is rarely (ever?) about truth, rather it is about perception. In other words, his admission was that he could care less whether people have accurate information as long as their perception benefited him.
Sometimes I think politicians have little choice given the way Americans consume media (soundbites, anecdotes, flat-out lies). The solution to virtually every societal 'problem' seems to be education (I dont just mean k-12, I mean of our voting populace as well). I hope it doesnt take things getting much, much worse before people are willing to wake up and start to educate themselves.
I think you are right. Though I think the world is too complex to be well informed on all the issues we need to be informed on. That probably also goes for the politicians. We somehow need to be able to recognize and select people with integrity and an ability to reason and communicate then trust them to make the correct judgments. (politicians should never move our country on poles.) Under them we also need a “stable” of good technocrats, a-political and expert in their specific fields to do the analysis and provide them with good information to make their decisions.
To do this well I am not sure we need to be well informed. Though we can’t be misinformed. The problem is that we have a broken system for identifying and selecting our politicians. In our political process we are bombarded with misinformation that, with today’s technologies is so easy to do. I am afraid that with the judgment brought down by the Supreme Court in Citizens United v. F.E.C., there is now available much more money to spread even more misinformation.
Here is a good project for us. Come up with ideas to remedy this.
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