What Rough Beast:

In the 21st Century, the process of newsgathering has undergone a radical change from even 10 years ago. In apparent affirmation of Moore’s Law, the amount of information that is publicly accessible has increased exponentially, through the availability of images and radically less expensive ways to transmit media from even the most isolated areas in the world. In fact, in this Media/Technology saturated world, even terms such as "isolated" and "remote" need to be refined. While the physical space between places remains the same, the advent of the Internet and e-mail has rendered distance, in terms of information transfer, an almost archaic notion. With this explosion of available information has come a wave of what can only be described as "creative" journalism: the wholesale manufacture of elements or even complete stories that are able to be passed off as fact. Unfortunately, the availability and ease of use of incredibly powerful media tools, as well as the exceptional amount of readily available information, has allowed journalists such as Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass to fabricate both the stories and the source material that these stories are "based" upon so convincingly that it has become almost impossible to verify these stories other than relying on random and rigorous "guerrilla" fact checking as Nicholas Lemann has suggested (Lemann 5). Glass, a 25 year old Associate Editor at The New Republic and freelance journalist supplying many of the top political and current affairs magazines in the late 1990s, was uncovered by a quick check of the Nexis-Lexis database by Adam Penenburg, a editor at Forbes Digital Tool; the only reference to Jukt Micronics, an imaginary software company featured so prominently in an article that Glass had written for The New Republic about teenage hackers extorting Fortune 500 companies, was the Glass article itself. (Goldberg 2). However, even that discovery was only made because of the timeliness of the Forbes inquiry. Eventually, had the article not initially aroused the suspicion of Penenburg, articles and papers would have referred to the Glass piece and thereby been added to the available database. In turn those articles and papers would have been cited until there was an impossibly intricate paper trail to unravel and--at least on paper--Jukt Micronics would have become as real as IBM or Microsoft. In their defence, editors at The New Republic countered that Glass, in order to fool the fact checkers, had fabricated both a corporate website for Jukt Micronics as well as several e-mail and voice mail accounts allegedly belonging to the characters in his article. This is where the true potential malignancy of the Internet lies, in its ability to effortlessly overwhelm the average user in masses of hyperlinks, URLs and sites with the superficial look of authority.
This mass of undifferentiated information has been referred to by Leslie Millin as " the intellectual landfill of the Internet" (Millin 400). It’s a very apt metaphor in that it captures the essence of the nature of the Internet as a dumping ground for all forms of media as well as a comment on the potential value of the majority of information gathered by quickly "scooping" it off random websites mentioned in a search engine. The "knowledge" gained by this method eliminates the linear path that traditional research forced upon students in the centuries preceding the advent of the Internet as a viable research venue. As cumbersome and involved as the traditional process could become, it forced students to actually engage the general subject material they were researching. They were required to determine what in the material was relevant to their purposes and look at it far more vigorously in order to "extract" the information needed for their specific purposes. In addition, this method demonstrated to the researcher that facts and information exist in a context, a surrounding body of ideas that predicate and qualify the information. Without this context, the relative worth of "facts" and opinions, their relationship to each other and, ultimately, the difference between them within an argument is far more difficult to determine.
In addition to adding context to evidence, much has been made of the supremacy of the peer review system as a counter to the fraudulent or shoddy "research" that seems to infest many Internet sites. While this is a valid and certainly accurate point, another result of the peer review process has been a stemming of the explosion of information that proliferates in the no holds barred atmosphere of the Internet. There can only be so much new material made available within a reasonable amount of time, due to the rigor of inquiry that most peer review imposes. And this pace has enabled most researchers to, if not keep pace with new research in terms of specifics, to at least do so in generalities. Now, with the ability to use a search engine to extract information, all the information would seemingly be relevant to the issue at hand. However, this relevance is, in many cases, an illusion, due to the complex and potentially fraudulent nature of information on the web. As well, the danger that the Internet imposes is not so much to researchers doing more advanced research, i.e. at the Masters or Doctoral level: they usually have a pretty in-depth grasp of where the areas of research in their field are being conducted and the general flow of the field. Most ominously, it is those students just entering a field as well as those exploring a topic for an isolated assignment who have not been properly trained in determining the proper sources who can be swayed by the masses of authentic looking documents online and can be fooled into thinking that what they see are the actual facts. Everything they read has, to them, the look if not the substance of authority. However, even if the information given is factual, there is the danger of the bias that many articles have built into them overwhelming or subverting the information. This bias is sometimes more a question of omitting the facts than distorting them. For example, a Right Wing online news agency will mention the incidences of John Kerry reversing his support on issues, with the implication that these reversals are an indication of a failure of resolve and character. However, they will fail to note that GW Bush has done the same thing on many occasions, as have most elected politicians, and that these reversals are, in fact, common practice in politics. Or, to use another example, the Democrats’ recent veto of the Act that would prohibit Partial Birth Abortions was portrayed by the Right as proof of the Left being in favour of PBAs when in fact the veto was against the wording of the act and was, strictly speaking, a legal matter. This lopsided presentation and the assertions that are implied by it can lead to a misinterpretation of the facts, if the student is not at least aware that these assumptions and faulty logic can exist. Obviously, the challenges that faulty logic and bias present to clarity within an argument are in no way limited to the Internet. However, as Millin states, "…Virtually all new technologies have unintended consequences…" (Millin 395) and the prevailing trend of the Internet and its associated media, such as increasingly complex video games, music downloads and visual media, has been to become an increasingly dominating cultural force. Computers and the Internet have become such a presence that their cultural influences, at least among those born since the emergence of the personal computer in the late Seventies, people who have known nothing else, have become ubiquitous.
A potential way to combat the potentially negative effects of this influence would be to instil in every student, as soon as they start to use the Internet as a research tool, the ability to evaluate the information with which they are presented. However, is this a practical thing to attempt? Can we reasonable expect to train our children to filter out the mass distractions and bombarding effects of mass culture and to somehow develop the capacity to logically and reasonably interpret information when the trend seems to be the gradual erosion of that capacity? The answer is, unfortunately, no. There will never be nor can there be a quick fix; unfortunately, the importance of this information will be increasingly inversely proportional to the amount of hype and glitz used to transmit it. The answer to this problem is never going to be cut and dried, nor will it be absolute and final. There will always be an action-reaction quality to it. However, if the strategy for combating these anti-intellectual and mass cultural blitzkrieg techniques could be reduced to one word, it would be this: vigilance.
However, this vigilance will have to encompass more than a mere resolve to look at the Internet or the Current Events section of the newspaper with a more cynical eye. It would require a retooling of the thought processes and the degree of trust that we had thought sufficient until now. In the past, sources such as the New York Times could be relied upon to provide at least factual reporting and thus maintain a certain credibility. Now, however, the actions of Blair and Glass have shattered that trust and left us with the discomfort of knowing that, in a very real sense, we are vulnerable to the actions of the technically proficient. As David Mamet pragmatically illustrates in his screenplay for the motion picture, "Wag the Dog," this technique of media manipulation can be configured to encompass any ideological objective, from Glass and Blair’s desire to create a more solid looking portfolio and thereby elevate themselves above their peers to a desire to sway a nation into supporting a course of action deemed necessary by either that nation or another’s leaders. However trivial or significant these actions are, it remains that we are a captive audience in that we are forced on rely on others to provide us with the bulk of our news and as such, are subject to the whims of the suppliers of that information. In order for us to reclaim a measure of autonomy in this relationship, it is solely our responsibility to develop the necessary mind-set and education to effectively deal with this supply. As well, we need to re-approach the manner in which we look at the media and the role we as the end-users play in the interaction between the media and ourselves. The act of interpreting media and transference of information consists of a somewhat symbiotic relationship, consisting of two "roles": the active and the passive. The role that each partner in the relationship takes and the form of media determines the dominance of each role within the relationship used to convey the message. As recipients, we can be readily divided into two camps: those who primarily receive their information through what can be described as active media, television and radio, or those who use a more passive form of media, newspapers and journals. The active media tend to assume an active mode of transferring the information to the recipient, who, as a result, is forced to be more passive in his reception of that information. Conversely, newspapers and journals force us to take a more active role in interpreting the information. The benefit of actively engaging media is this: We, as a species, are primarily visual in terms of information gathering. Language is a relatively new development, at least at its current level of complexity. Written language is even more recent, approximately ten thousand years old by most accounts, and therefore artificial in terms of the natural world. The Encyclopaedia Britannica states that "…writing is in principle the representation of language rather than a direct representation of thought…. and is therefore a social construct far more than it is an evolution in communication." (Encyclop. Brit. 2004). The implication of this is that, due to the artificial quality of writing, we are unable to merely understand or process it instinctively and are therefore forced to interpret it and it is in this interpretative act that we are allowed the optimal opportunity to deconstruct and analyse the content. Michael Posner, in "Image World", a 2003 essay on the effects of visual media, states that "Text requires another level of mediation, a mental or intellectual filter that distances us from what we are reading"(Posner 239). It is this distance and mediation, along with a wary and vigilant mind-set, that are our best tools with which to fashion a defence against the effects of media bombardment and an increasingly manufactured "Reality."
Ultimately, to repel the ever more culturally entrenched trend towards passive acceptance and digestion of information, we need, to paraphrase Mahatma Gandhi, to become the kinds of thinkers we’d like to see more of within the culture.