The Colbert Rapport
I had been thinking a bit about the state of persuasion in the United States when I saw a post by Matthew Yglesias (guest blogging at talkingpointsmemo, sort of) about Mike McCurry and net neutrality, something I hope to learn more about next year. Anyway, the gist is that McCurry made some (allegedly) bad arguments. This would have flown with traditional media, the story goes, but bloggers have expertise and bullshit filters and whatnot.
It's true that we live in a bullshit culture. People don't feel the need to make honest arguments, or good arguments. They depend on the ignorance of their audience. They provoke emotional responses to shut off rational thought.
A bit of a backlash has arisen. The Daily Show and the Colbert Report basically make their living mocking the absurdity of the media. In particular, Fox News and its imitators are easy to deride because they are so close to self-parody. A little nudge is all it takes.
Still, I'm not sanguine about the power of blogs to rise above the morass. Sure, as Matt points out, bloggers in the aggregate tend to have wide and deep knowledge. The problem, as always, is sorting that knowledge (the pervasiveness of the problem and Google's ability to overcome it probably explain a lot of the Google enthusiasm we see). Comments sections tend to have a very adverse ratio of knowledge to dreck, so wading through them generally isn't advisable. Expert bloggers tend to have ideological axes to grind, and anyway it's not easy for a layman to tell an expert from a fraud.
I do feel that a defining characteristic of our age is the extent to which low-level propaganda has saturated the arena of persuasion, which itself has swallowed up almost everything. I'll post more about this, but the essential insight is that everything is up for grabs. On one level it's appropriate for everything to be subjected to scrutiny, but people are sufficiently ignorant that this "scrutiny" often turns into an ideological attempt to skew perceptions. This is how evolution becomes controversial. I have a friend who is getting his PhD in biochemistry (I think - something along those lines), and he believed that sperm could get through an unbroken latex condom. A fortiori, then, HIV could get through, and the Catholic Church wasn't lying when it said condoms were ineffective against HIV. That a biochem grad student can believe this is a testament to the power of propaganda.
Conservatives have been better at waging this propaganda war in recent years, but there's no reason to think that it has an inherent ideological valence. Anti-corporate and anti-market rhetoric can be just as poisonous and seems to be gaining traction. The problem is that each side has an incentive to engage in deceitful, disingenuous arguments. Conservatives undermine science and medicine when it suits them; liberals do the same to mainstream economics (economics does demand scrutiny because there's a lot of wacky stuff out there, but I'm talking about standard economic logic). We would all benefit if we agreed to lay off the bullshit, but there's no way to enforce such an agreement.
And then there are the people who really make you slap your forehead, who probably actually believe the shit they're spewing (and the sheer venom in lots of comments sections is unbelievable). So yeah, I'm skeptical about the ability of anything (other than very careful and active reading on the part of the audience) to stop this culture of bullshit. Am I underestimating people? Do most Fox News viewers take it all with a grain of salt? If so, why don't they just turn on NPR instead?
It's true that we live in a bullshit culture. People don't feel the need to make honest arguments, or good arguments. They depend on the ignorance of their audience. They provoke emotional responses to shut off rational thought.
A bit of a backlash has arisen. The Daily Show and the Colbert Report basically make their living mocking the absurdity of the media. In particular, Fox News and its imitators are easy to deride because they are so close to self-parody. A little nudge is all it takes.
Still, I'm not sanguine about the power of blogs to rise above the morass. Sure, as Matt points out, bloggers in the aggregate tend to have wide and deep knowledge. The problem, as always, is sorting that knowledge (the pervasiveness of the problem and Google's ability to overcome it probably explain a lot of the Google enthusiasm we see). Comments sections tend to have a very adverse ratio of knowledge to dreck, so wading through them generally isn't advisable. Expert bloggers tend to have ideological axes to grind, and anyway it's not easy for a layman to tell an expert from a fraud.
I do feel that a defining characteristic of our age is the extent to which low-level propaganda has saturated the arena of persuasion, which itself has swallowed up almost everything. I'll post more about this, but the essential insight is that everything is up for grabs. On one level it's appropriate for everything to be subjected to scrutiny, but people are sufficiently ignorant that this "scrutiny" often turns into an ideological attempt to skew perceptions. This is how evolution becomes controversial. I have a friend who is getting his PhD in biochemistry (I think - something along those lines), and he believed that sperm could get through an unbroken latex condom. A fortiori, then, HIV could get through, and the Catholic Church wasn't lying when it said condoms were ineffective against HIV. That a biochem grad student can believe this is a testament to the power of propaganda.
Conservatives have been better at waging this propaganda war in recent years, but there's no reason to think that it has an inherent ideological valence. Anti-corporate and anti-market rhetoric can be just as poisonous and seems to be gaining traction. The problem is that each side has an incentive to engage in deceitful, disingenuous arguments. Conservatives undermine science and medicine when it suits them; liberals do the same to mainstream economics (economics does demand scrutiny because there's a lot of wacky stuff out there, but I'm talking about standard economic logic). We would all benefit if we agreed to lay off the bullshit, but there's no way to enforce such an agreement.
And then there are the people who really make you slap your forehead, who probably actually believe the shit they're spewing (and the sheer venom in lots of comments sections is unbelievable). So yeah, I'm skeptical about the ability of anything (other than very careful and active reading on the part of the audience) to stop this culture of bullshit. Am I underestimating people? Do most Fox News viewers take it all with a grain of salt? If so, why don't they just turn on NPR instead?
posted by James | 11:45 PM
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