Envision a world with nearly 60% of 7.9 billion people online. That is the state of Internet use today, in 2022. Before 2000, less than one billion people were connected, and a decade before that, less than 30 million people.
While Internet patronage has exploded, and the sharing and dissemination of information is unprecedented in human history, humankind is no closer to achieving what anyone would call cohesion. In many respects, we are heading in the opposite direction: splintering. How can this be so in an era where virtually anyone can access the Internet and make a thorough exploration on any topic or issue?
One answer is that on any major topic, the information explosion is too much for anyone to fathom. Add in the inherent bias of the news reporting and how little time you might have to thoroughly read, ingest, and fathom what you’ve read, and you have the keys to less agreement, unity, and social harmony than ever before.
Controlling the Narrative
People were not better off in previous eras when there was a dearth of information. For most of recorded history, whoever did the recording, controlled the history. Today, with the plethora of news sources, in free societies no one has a monopoly on what is disseminated to the populace. Still, it is possible to control the narrative, like it’s done in the U.S. mainstream media — The Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, NPR, NBC, CBS, ABC, MSNBC, CNN, and other purveyors of a like-minded, pre-determined agenda dominate.
When every story, issue, and square inch of semantic space is politicized, one can expect exceedingly little agreement on any particular topic. Even events that happened within the last year, for which an abundance of reporting sources, video and audio recordings, eyewitnesses, and other documentation exist, major disagreement over what actually happened, let alone the implications, are likely. Why? What we ingest is filtered by our predispositions.
Spin, or a contortion of issues, is not merely a political phenomenon dispensed by PR handlers, it is a growing phenomenon that impacts every arena of human endeavor. Psychological processes such as selective attention, selective perception, and selective retention ensure that what one concludes on any particular issue might not be rooted in scientific fact.
’Til the Facts Get in the Way
For decades people reported being abducted by Martians, until telescopes and surface probes conclusively showed no intelligent life on Mars, at least for the past million years. Facts can be quite inconvenient. Those who claimed “Martian abduction” sauntered away only to be replaced by those who claimed “alien abduction” which opened up an array of abduction “possibilities.”
What can we expect in the future? Within a few years, more than half the planet will have access to the Internet, and eventually nearly everyone will. Yet a high level connectivity does not ensure that the facts of vital and emerging issues are ingested sufficiently around the globe. When seven out of eight billion people have online connectivity, given the human propensity to color and distort even the most basic of phenomena, expect an even greater level of Babel-like misunderstandings and missed connections.
Jeff Davidson is “The Work-Life Balance Expert®” and the premier thought leader on work-life balance, integration, and harmony. Jeff speaks to organizations that seek to enhance their overall productivity by improving the effectiveness of their people. He is the author of Breathing Space, Perfect Timing, Simpler Living, Dial it Down, and Everyday Project Management.