Between Chaos and Control

Misinformation is dangerous. As well as the obvious problem of acting on bad intelligence there is also the time and effort that is redirected to the dispelling of myths, panic and lies - time and effort that could be better applied.

As Hurricane Sandy made landfall in the United States - after causing large amounts of damage and taking at least 20 lives across the Caribbean from Jamaica to the Dominican Republic (Fox, 2012) - a Twitter user @ComfortablySmug, that has apparently turned out to be one Shashank Tripathi, spread rumours of power cuts being enacted across New York that were picked up by national news coverage (Kaczynski, 2012).

These kinds of mistruths are subject to some scrutiny in Max Brooks' fiction World War Z, where the lack of comprehension in the face of fear led to the Great Panic - where superstition and unbridled rumours caused as many or more deaths than the undead blight itself.

However, Voloshinov highlighted the dangers of allowing just the opposite: too much institutional control of truth (Voloshinov, 1973). Language, as the medium for debating evidence and there-in fact, is a dangerous thing to leave to the control of any central institution. Through such control comes the possibility of tyranny - even over ideas and the ability to offer critique.

The previews to Hideo Kojima's upcoming addition to the Metal Gear series, Ground Zeroes, seems likely to delve into some of these issues (Dawkins, 2012). It appears likely to tackle the ideological divide revealed in Guns of the Patriots to have been the driving force behind the events of the series. This divide - between Major Zero and Big Boss - was caused by the separate interpretations of their admired mentor's will; it billowed into full-blown ideological war between control and chaos.

There has to be a safe haven between the dangers foreseen by both Orwell and Huxley - the opposing dangers of the institutionalised control of truth, and the contextless, unverifiable, rumours and speculation. John Stuart Mill described this middle ground as requiring the active participation of both sides, both conservatism and liberalism, in order to see the whole picture (Mill, 1859):

'It is almost a commonplace that a party of order or stability and a party of progress or reform are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life, until the one or the other shall have so enlarged its mental grasp as to be a party equally of order and of progress, knowing and distinguishing what is fit to be preserved from what ought to be swept away. Each of these modes of thinking derives its utility from the deficiencies of the other; but it is in great measure the opposition of the other that keeps each within the limits of reason and sanity.'

Yet checking sources, checking evidence and considering the logical likelihoods with a critical eye - all while being wary of personal subjectivities and dogmatisms - offer us a guard against mistruth. The fact that @ComfortablySmug's rumours made it onto national news coverage is a testament to the difficulty of the task; and a reminder that we sometimes fail (Beaujon, 2012). Those failures cannot be passed off onto social networks like Twitter, which aided in the carrying out of at least as much good as bad when Sandy made landfall (Pearce, 2012).

As always, our best safeguard remains personal vigilance.

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References:
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+ Everton Fox's 'Hurricane Sandy hits the Caribbean'; on Al Jazeera; 29 October 2012.

+ Andrew Kaczynski's 'How One Well-Connected Pseudonymous Twitter Spread Fake News About Hurricane Sandy'; on BuzzFeed Politics; 30 October 2012.

+ Max Brooks' 'World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War'; Duckworth, 2007.

+ Valentin Voloshinov's 'Marxism and the Philosophy of Language'; Harvard University Press, 1973.

+ Daniel Dawkins' 'Exposed: The secrets of Metal Gear Solid Ground Zeroes'; on CVG UK; 30 August 2012.

+ George Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty-Four'; Secker & Warburg; 1949.

+ Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World'; Chatto & Windus;1932.

+ John Stuart Mill's 'On Liberty'; 1859.

+ Andrew Beaujon's 'Whose fault is it that "Comfortably Smug" lies about Hurricane Sandy spread'; on Poynter.org; 1 November 2012.

+ Matt Pearce's 'Twitter in the time of Sandy: A few lies, and then redemption'; in the LA Times; 5 November 2012.