Wednesday, November 15
Information rights 1: On which democracy survives
CENSORSHIP, MEDIA, INFORMATION
I've been wanting to write for a long time about the role of information in a socialist society. The way information is distributed is incredibly important in understanding how a society works. Our lives are centered around and controlled by the ebb and flow of power, and a certain amount of that power is knowledge. The immediate consequence of that is that a truly democratic society must be perfectly transparent. In order to make decisions, we must be fully informed, and we cannot allow the flow of information to be filtered, influenced, or restricted by anyone.
In today's society, there are huge filters on our information. There's some outright government censorship. We don't run into it every day (though the way they do things in the west, subtlety's really the point), but that's largely because a lot of the other filters are doing the censors' job for them. Then there's deliberate secrecy: most companies and governments have disciplinary procedures against whistleblowers, who report on things like atrocious environmental records, and many cover-ups can be acheived simply by not making the relevant documents public. The next filter is the press. See, when documents are made 'public', in practice that doesn't mean you can walk in and ask for a copy, or that you can visit the appropriate website and download it. What is generally meant is that information is submitted to newspapers (and at that, only the outlets that look as if they won't be too critical, if the organisation in question thinks it can get away with it). The media outlets then decide whether to cover the story at all, whether to include a snappy quote, or whether to give a detailed breakdown of the information they've received. Chances are it won't be that last option. Additionally, the media put their own spin on the story. This is separate from outright control of information in that it just involves how the data is framed - but it has a similar effect, in that clever journalists can hide the real value of information behind their rhetoric: you generally have to be reading very carefully between the lines to pick this out.
Behind all of these, there are more subtle systematic self-censorships. Media outlets do not publish articles that could harm the interests of their advertisers, as advertisers are the source of much of their revenue. This is true even for expensive papers - the price is there not so much to pay for the paper, but to attract a more wealthy class of reader for the advertisers. Politicians have obvious vested interests in whether or not they publish reports on their own governments' failures, but they also have interests in protecting their sponsors from the glare of media cameras. Government inquiries and reports are easily buried: sometimes all this takes is for the appropriate department to fail to call the media's attention to the 'publication' - essentially, what should be public records become internal memos that can theoretically be demanded - if you know about them in the first place. None of this need ever be considered intentional censorship. More often, it's just that newspaper editors who don't rock the boat with the advertisers make for more profitable newspapers, and therefore they survive longer. Those who scrupulously try to counteract their biases find themselves out of a job pretty fast. Similarly in politics: Broke politicians cannot afford to fight elections, and when it comes to suppressing proof of their own failure, the politician never considers the possibility that they themsleves might be at fault - they just assume the worrisome evidence is unrepresentative.
Now, there are some who will argue that the public can't handle all this information, and we need our elites to spoonfeed us, else we'd be swamped and no-one would know anything. There are many replies to this, among which the first must be that it's utter chaff. Most people are quite able to absorb vast amounts of information about subjects they're passionate about, be it sports results, astronomy, gardening, or television soaps. Why not issues about society that affect us daily, often on a far more direct basis than any football match or soap? Second, we don't need an omniscient populace for a democracy. All we need is omniscience in potentia, so to speak. In order to read a book in French, I do not need to know all the words in that book, so long as I have access to a dictionary which can define them for me. It's the same for society. If I want to vote on whether a drug should be available on presciption, then I should have easy access to society's store of knowledge on that drug - how it's made, known side-effects, dosage, etc. Third, it's not even as if the intelligentsia of today are the best people for the job. Politicians certainly shouldn't get to decide what government does and doesn't make known about itself. Journalists are notoriously terrible at correctly explaining scientific information and ideas. Insofar as we need an official filtration system, those responsible should be elected and entirely unconnected with the political establishment. Of course, that's impossible in today's incestuous world of corporate politics, but that's why we need social change.
Finally, I want to make a distinction between information and opinion. I accept entirely that there's a grey area there, but that does not mean the two are entirely inseperable. In short, every document produced under official auspices (i.e. asked for by democratic decision and therefore paid-for by society) must be free and open to all. For the most part, this will mean statistics, results of investigations, and collations of data in more accessible formats. Opinion, such as that which dominates today's papers, should not be funded by society - there is no need to endorse or privilege one opinion over another. The newspapers of tomorrow will be like today's blogs and syndicates (though probably less like this one and more like the SUB). But I refer you to my previous point: unlike today's scratchings at the periphery of the mainstream media, bloggers in a socialist society would have direct access to sources, they could write not just about their own experiences, but they could draw conclusions from a perspective as informed as any of today's professional researchers. In short, it means liberation for everyone concerned.
There will be a part two.
CENSORSHIP, MEDIA, INFORMATION
I've been wanting to write for a long time about the role of information in a socialist society. The way information is distributed is incredibly important in understanding how a society works. Our lives are centered around and controlled by the ebb and flow of power, and a certain amount of that power is knowledge. The immediate consequence of that is that a truly democratic society must be perfectly transparent. In order to make decisions, we must be fully informed, and we cannot allow the flow of information to be filtered, influenced, or restricted by anyone.
In today's society, there are huge filters on our information. There's some outright government censorship. We don't run into it every day (though the way they do things in the west, subtlety's really the point), but that's largely because a lot of the other filters are doing the censors' job for them. Then there's deliberate secrecy: most companies and governments have disciplinary procedures against whistleblowers, who report on things like atrocious environmental records, and many cover-ups can be acheived simply by not making the relevant documents public. The next filter is the press. See, when documents are made 'public', in practice that doesn't mean you can walk in and ask for a copy, or that you can visit the appropriate website and download it. What is generally meant is that information is submitted to newspapers (and at that, only the outlets that look as if they won't be too critical, if the organisation in question thinks it can get away with it). The media outlets then decide whether to cover the story at all, whether to include a snappy quote, or whether to give a detailed breakdown of the information they've received. Chances are it won't be that last option. Additionally, the media put their own spin on the story. This is separate from outright control of information in that it just involves how the data is framed - but it has a similar effect, in that clever journalists can hide the real value of information behind their rhetoric: you generally have to be reading very carefully between the lines to pick this out.
Behind all of these, there are more subtle systematic self-censorships. Media outlets do not publish articles that could harm the interests of their advertisers, as advertisers are the source of much of their revenue. This is true even for expensive papers - the price is there not so much to pay for the paper, but to attract a more wealthy class of reader for the advertisers. Politicians have obvious vested interests in whether or not they publish reports on their own governments' failures, but they also have interests in protecting their sponsors from the glare of media cameras. Government inquiries and reports are easily buried: sometimes all this takes is for the appropriate department to fail to call the media's attention to the 'publication' - essentially, what should be public records become internal memos that can theoretically be demanded - if you know about them in the first place. None of this need ever be considered intentional censorship. More often, it's just that newspaper editors who don't rock the boat with the advertisers make for more profitable newspapers, and therefore they survive longer. Those who scrupulously try to counteract their biases find themselves out of a job pretty fast. Similarly in politics: Broke politicians cannot afford to fight elections, and when it comes to suppressing proof of their own failure, the politician never considers the possibility that they themsleves might be at fault - they just assume the worrisome evidence is unrepresentative.
Now, there are some who will argue that the public can't handle all this information, and we need our elites to spoonfeed us, else we'd be swamped and no-one would know anything. There are many replies to this, among which the first must be that it's utter chaff. Most people are quite able to absorb vast amounts of information about subjects they're passionate about, be it sports results, astronomy, gardening, or television soaps. Why not issues about society that affect us daily, often on a far more direct basis than any football match or soap? Second, we don't need an omniscient populace for a democracy. All we need is omniscience in potentia, so to speak. In order to read a book in French, I do not need to know all the words in that book, so long as I have access to a dictionary which can define them for me. It's the same for society. If I want to vote on whether a drug should be available on presciption, then I should have easy access to society's store of knowledge on that drug - how it's made, known side-effects, dosage, etc. Third, it's not even as if the intelligentsia of today are the best people for the job. Politicians certainly shouldn't get to decide what government does and doesn't make known about itself. Journalists are notoriously terrible at correctly explaining scientific information and ideas. Insofar as we need an official filtration system, those responsible should be elected and entirely unconnected with the political establishment. Of course, that's impossible in today's incestuous world of corporate politics, but that's why we need social change.
Finally, I want to make a distinction between information and opinion. I accept entirely that there's a grey area there, but that does not mean the two are entirely inseperable. In short, every document produced under official auspices (i.e. asked for by democratic decision and therefore paid-for by society) must be free and open to all. For the most part, this will mean statistics, results of investigations, and collations of data in more accessible formats. Opinion, such as that which dominates today's papers, should not be funded by society - there is no need to endorse or privilege one opinion over another. The newspapers of tomorrow will be like today's blogs and syndicates (though probably less like this one and more like the SUB). But I refer you to my previous point: unlike today's scratchings at the periphery of the mainstream media, bloggers in a socialist society would have direct access to sources, they could write not just about their own experiences, but they could draw conclusions from a perspective as informed as any of today's professional researchers. In short, it means liberation for everyone concerned.
There will be a part two.
# posted by Phugebrins @ 00:25 
