Pi-Consulting

Economic downturn? What economic downturn? Paris Hilton went on a New Year shopping spree in Sydney, Australia, spending $4,000 in less than an hour. The world’s news media erupted, fingering the self-publicizing socialite for “callous disregard” of the deprivations that ordinary folk were going through. This kind of negative coverage has resulted in a furtive change of behavior among some shopaholics who still have plenty in the bank. Kathy Fuld, the wife of the deposed Lehman Brothers chief Dick Fuld, seems to have salvaged much of the wealth he amassed before the firm’s demise, including the $13 million home he recently sold her for $10. Anxious not to draw enemy fire while trawling the mall, she has reportedly evolved a new form of “stealth shopping,” instructing sales clerks in ritzy apparel stores like Hermès to put her merchandise in plain shopping bags rather than the orange ones with the conspicuous Hermès brand name on them. It’s the return of the “plain brown wrapper”. As New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd acerbically comments about the anonymous shopping bags, “Americans are suffering from luxury shame. …A practice once reserved for men’s magazine pornography is now being used to mask the ‘pornography’ of spending”. Source: NYT

There are more than 100 million active blogs on the internet. Readers of blogs now vastly outnumber people who read serious unbiased news and information sources, online or offline.

At the top of the heap are those blogs written by truthful journalists, experts and informed commentators, many of whom have day jobs at reputable printed and online publications. Some of them (this one included), try very hard to propagate truth and informed commentary untainted by hearsay, innuendo and ideological baggage. They can generally be relied on to ensure that everything they publish comes from a reputable and believable source, and has been responsibly verified.

Other blogs dedicate themselves to spreading biased, twisted and often blatantly untrue “information” masquerading as “facts”. You can usually tell the latter kind by their ranting and self-justifying style, their poor spelling, and the clear impression they give that a case is being advanced for some “righteous” (that tell-tale word!) cause, sect or interest group.

But people seem to love that stuff. One of the effects of the decline of newsprint publications and the inexorable rise of the internet is that many of us can now chose only to read the ‘facts’ and opinions that actively appeal to us. Faced with the massed ranks of the crazed, the biased, the finger-waggers and those whose beliefs are more important to them than what they actually know, millions of credulous readers nod sagely, and murmur “There, just as I thought”. Lunatic conspiracy theories have never been easier to spread. Look at the amazing ease with which the Bush White House convinced America of blatant untruths, such as Saddam Hussein being behind the 9/11 attacks. Look how many American voters were gulled into believing that the future president was a practicing Muslim.

If you really want to believe something, it will not take you long to find support for your cherished credo. The trouble is, that “proof” is liable to be a pack of lies. In the minds of many, “The Truth” is being supplanted by “My Truth”. Anything that challenges or undermines “My Truth” can easily be dismissed with “well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?”, or denounced as a vile conspiracy against the certainties of the righteously indignant. Indeed, if you’re lazy, you can dismiss everything you disagree with as “too much information”.

In early 2009, two ideas surfaced which may push the tide back in favor of truth-telling.

The first is the idea of endowments for reputable but financially troubled newspaper publishing companies. A team of financial experts at Yale University has noted that dwindling newsstand sales and slumping advertising revenues are forcing America’s best newspapers to slash their teams of international reporters, and are even putting some papers on the endangered species list. Migration of readers to internet versions of their publications is not doing enough to keep the news and comment coming, since web-based newspaper editions operate on a different and far less lucrative business model.

In an article titled “News You Can Endow” (New York Times 01/28/09), Yale’s chief investment officer David Swensen argues that “Enlightened philanthropists must act now or watch a vital component of American democracy fade into irrelevance”. Endowment funds, Swensen believes, is the only sure way of keeping these valued truth-telling publications in business.

The other welcome development is at Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia site. Wikipedia is a ‘wiki’, a website that allows visitors to easily add, remove, or otherwise edit content at their whim. Being voluntary, Wikipedia was launched with no real editor. Its driving principle is “This is my truth; what’s yours?”. The aim is not necessarily truth per se, but the warm, fuzzy feeling of consensus.

The flaws in this reasoning have just been exposed. During Barack Obama’s inauguration, Senators Edward Kennedy and Robert Byrd were taken ill. Both recovered, but within minutes of the occurrences, items appeared on Wikipedia stating flatly that they had died. Whether the people posting these items were stupid, ill-informed or malicious does not really matter. Truth was the casualty. The site scrambled to correct the “mistakes”, and now appears ready to introduce a system of “flagged revisions”, which will subject newly posted “facts” to a system of screening and scrutiny. This will cost Wikipedia money, but it will do much to impede the spread of misinformation.

But the overall problem remains. Looking at the vast majority of blogs and internet bulletin boards, the innocent reader has no means of telling whether they are reading the truth, a biased message, a pile of garbage or a deliberate untruth.

Caveat lector.