In 1990 Alvin Toffler (best known for his book Future Shock) wrote a book called “Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century” (Goodreads). In that book, Toffler described three types of power:
- Force (physical power)
- Wealth (economic power)
- Knowledge (the power of information)
Or, as it is better described on his chapter 2: Muscle, Money and Mind.
After the first decade of 21st Century, I would add one more type: Deception.
Since several years back the access to information has become massively fast and easy. One person can access to old and new information in a matter of minutes (or seconds) with one hand. The growth of Internet, information services and social media engineered to connect everyone with everyone helped to share what is happening in one remote part of the World with everyone around the glove in just a few minutes. This is so big that nowadays news agencies and newspapers are way behind of spreading breaking news as they cannot keep up with the pace of how news are shared through Internet. And the true is that today, every person with a mobile or computer with Internet access is a real “news agency”.
In my opinion this is great. Never in history we had such a big megaphone for the people and the opportunity to (a) spread any news which is happening in real time and (b) access to most of human knowledge everywhere.
But as always, every great advance has its drawback. The nature of Internet is to be open and democratic; and although some countries try to block and control it, they will be putting doors to the field. This will give an advantage for some people to spread false information intentionally and hide it with half trues; doing it in a smart way and continuously so false news will easily become true news where even the most prestigious newspapers will print their front page with them.
Fake news are now a fact when a couple of years back no one believed this can be happening. Today a normal person can have a big audience of several thousand people who can read/watch/listen what this person says (think in an average youtuber or blogger who easily can reach these numbers of followers). This is power and as all kind of power can be used wisely or foolishly.
Here is where deception comes out strong. The era of information we are living on is sometimes used to spread hoaxes and frame an illusion to the wide audience that is built to generate some kind of benefit to the ones orchestrating it. We have recent examples with the new populism used with some politicians and successfully achieved their goals: Trump campaign, Brexit and recent VOX campaign in Spain are good examples of it.
This is a very interesting and complex topic: why people are blindly following ideas that, when they are deeply analysed are smoke bombs? What I think about this is that people do not well understand some topics, they build an opinion under their own logic, share this opinion to a wide audience and there are other people who believe them. This make a perfect primordial soup for guiding and manipulate thoughts if someone knows how to build a masterplan for this.
Sometimes can be difficult to scape from these trends. However I believe there are ways not to fall on this; one simple way is to contrast the news with different sources, find the original source and most important COMMON SENSE; even if its definition is changing… But this is a different story for another post.
