Leading in the Misinformation age

Victor Kiam once said that information is a negotiators greatest weapon. Then, Thomas Jefferson acknowledged that it is indeed the currency of democracy. Hunter Grass was quoted to have wit-fully affirmed that information networks literally straddle the world. But, it’s Ronald Reagan who crowned it all when he gazetted it the oxygen of the modern world.

I should naturally follow this with the declaration made decades ago, that we live in the 'information age'. True, it is the world of personal digital assistants, portable newspapers and virtual friends. While the libraries of yester-years prided themselves as being one-stop hubs of knowledge now they are just one among a list of secondary sources in a research methods handout.

It’s about celebrity mania, the trending, and the elusive fashionable, instant unrestricted file sharing and mass self-communication. A world where grammar is tortured everyday even by the very custodians ever so unwittingly that listing the comma splice as sloppy punctuation would be hardly grasped.

It’s a bare fact that access to information has exceeded even the wildest expectations of Gutenberg when he invented the printing press. Knowledge had been the preserve of the clergy and aristocrats, every other subject had to take their interpretation as truth. As such these ‘informed’ few would do as they pleased riding effortlessly on the ignorance of the majority. In fact, it is this very monopoly over information that made the church a monstrosity of an institution commanding sheer submissiveness for several centuries.

Current governments have tried to replicate the church’s methods but they have been abortive with democracy and ‘new media’.

So, with this backdrop you’d say that decisions that we make are more judicious and undoubtedly leading to the well-being of the individual.  But as we well might know, this is hardly the case. In fact, with all this arguably ubiquitous information flow, our choices are plummeting westwards, lost in the whirlwind of real-time communication. The reason is not the availability, it’s not even apathy. It lays solely in paying attention to the wrong information, or rather the wrong sources.

Lazarsfeld and Katz in the 40s suggested that information flows in a two-step process, first from the source (in their case the media), to opinion leaders. The second step is from the opinion leaders to the masses. Now, those with most access to media and having more literate understanding of media content, naturally become the opinion leaders consequently becoming the sources and diffusing their (mis)understating.

Not forgetting that raucous woman who sports the same headdress at every chief baraza, she has managed to head the local maendeleo ya wanawake for years. Her kind, pride in accumulating adversaries at the grassroots, since it has become an associated characteristic of achievement.

While their study was based on mediated information it provides in the retrospect, a plausible explanation of the consistent wrong use of information that the ‘developing’ world has been grappling with.

Every single village has that stout bearded man or that occasional bald-head with an unflattering moustache and is very sure to have a couple of pot-bellied grey-haired bimbos whose rudimentary baby-fat is pityingly mistaken for a sign of wealth, health or even insight. 

These are level one opinion leaders, it’s largely more than just media messages they are explaining and diffusing but rather all kinds of information that trickles down from government and all. Once they have taken a stand, local watering-holes and other informal places get abuzz. Am not suggesting a magic bullet here but the reality is that they hold considerable sway despite the information being available to all it’s the few who pay attention, know where to find and better still, know how to use it that thrive.

The urban or ‘educated’ or ‘informed’ fellow would view this as a scene lifted from some remote village. The tragedy is that the very opinion leaders impact the choices that the ‘educated’ (am tempted to add the suffix idiot) makes only that this time they wear different headdresses, have trimmed hair, rare pot-bellies and have refined English, occasional Italian suits, dine respectably and have some penchant oblique duplicity.

Even when this informed fellow eludes these two classes of opinion leaders, his greatest undoing will still rest in paying attention to the wrong information and passionately following the rugged, beaten path of mediocrity that I’d call masked ignorance. 

A communication skills lecture I had in my junior year proves perfect elucidation for this fellow’s condition. Its noise, that’s what you are paying attention to when all those opportunities fly past you (that is if you even noticed they did.)

PS did you see that comma splice?