Van geheugenverlies tot infobesitas
Thursday, 30 October 2008 08:29 By Naomi Wolf
NEW YORK
- Is this the Age of the Conspiracy Theory? Plenty of evidence
suggests that we are in something of a golden age for citizen
speculation, documentation, and inference that takes shape - usually on
the Internet - and spreads virally around the globe. In the process,
conspiracy theories are pulled from the margins of public discourse,
where they were generally consigned in the past, and sometimes into the
very heart of politics.
I learned this by accident. Having written a book about the hijacking
of executive power in the United States in the Bush years, I found
myself, in researching new developments, stumbling upon conversations
online that embrace narratives of behind-the-scenes manipulation.
There are some major themes. A frequent one in the US is that global
elites are plotting - via the Bilderberg Group and the Council on
Foreign Relations, among others - to establish a "One World Government"
dominated by themselves rather than national governments. Sometimes,
more folkloric details come into play, broadening the members of this
cabal to include the Illuminati, the Freemasons, Rhodes Scholars, or, as
always, the Jews.
The hallmarks
of this narrative are familiar to anyone who has studied the
transmission of certain story categories in times of crisis. In
literary terms, this conspiracy theory closely resembles The Protocols
of the Elders of Zion , featuring secretive global elite with great
power and wicked aims. Historically, there tends to be the same set of
themes: fearsome, uncontrolled transformative change led by educated,
urbanized cosmopolitans. Students of Weimar Germany know that sudden
dislocations and shocks - rapid urbanization, disruption of traditional
family and social ties, loosening of sexual restrictions, and economic
collapse - primed many Germans to become receptive to simplistic
theories that seemed to address their confusion and offer a larger
meaning to their suffering.
Similarly, the "9/11 Truth Movement" asserts that al-Qaeda's attack on
the Twin Towers was an "inside job." In the Muslim world, there is a
widespread conspiracy theory that the Israelis were behind those
attacks, and that all Jews who worked in the buildings stayed home that
day.
Usually, conspiracy theories surface where people are poorly educated
and a rigorous independent press is lacking. So why are such theories
gaining adherents in the US and other affluent democracies nowadays?
Today's explosion of conspiracy theories has been stoked by the same
conditions that drove their acceptance in the past: rapid social change
and profound economic uncertainty. A clearly designated "enemy" with an
unmistakable "plan" is psychologically more comforting than the
chaotic evolution of social norms and the workings - or failures - of
unfettered capitalism. And, while conspiracy theories are often
patently irrational, the questions they address are often healthy, even
if the answers are frequently unsourced or just plain wrong.
In seeking answers, these citizens are reacting rationally to
irrational realities. Many citizens believe, rightly, that their mass
media are failing to investigate and document abuses. Newspapers in most advanced countries
are struggling or folding, and investigative reporting is often the
first thing they cut. Concentration of media ownership and control
further fuels popular mistrust, setting the stage for citizen
investigation to enter the vacuum.
Likewise, in an age when corporate lobbyists have a free hand in
shaping - if not drafting - public policies, many people believe, again
rightly, that their elected officials no longer represent them. Hence
their impulse to believe in unseen forces.
Finally, even rational people have become more receptive to certain
conspiracy theories because, in the last eight years, we actually have
seen some sophisticated conspiracies. The Bush administration conspired
to lead Americans and others into an illegal war, using fabricated
evidence to do so. Is it any wonder, then, that so many rational people
are trying to make sense of a political reality that really has become
unusually opaque? When even the 9/11 commissioners renounce their own
conclusions (because they were based on evidence derived from torture),
is it surprising that many want a second investigation?
Frequently enough, it is citizens digging at the margins of the
discourse - pursuing such theories - who report on news that the
mainstream media ignores. For example, it took a "conspiracy theorist,"
Alex Jones, to turn up documentation of microwave technologies to be
used by police forces on US citizens. The New Yorker confirmed the story
much later - without crediting the original source.
The mainstream media's tendency to avoid checking out or reporting what
is actually newsworthy in Internet conspiracy theories partly reflects
class bias. Conspiracy theories are seen as vulgar and lowbrow. So
even good, critical questions or well-sourced data unearthed by citizen
investigators tend to be regarded as radioactive to highly educated
formal journalists.
The real problem with this frantic conspiracy theorizing is that it
leaves citizens emotionally agitated but without a solid ground of
evidence upon which to base their worldview, and without constructive
directions in which to turn their emotions. This is why so many threads
of discussion turn from potentially interesting citizen speculation to
hate speech and paranoia. In a fevered environment, without good
editorial validation or tools for sourcing, citizens can be preyed upon
and whipped up by demagogues, as we saw in recent weeks at Sarah
Palin's rallies after Internet theories painted Barack Obama as a
terrorist or in league with terrorists.
We need to change the flow of information in the Internet age. Citizens
should be able more easily to leak information, pitch stories, and
send leads to mainstream investigative reporters. They should organize
new online entities in which they pay a fee for direct investigative
reporting, unmediated by corporate pressures. And citizen investigators
should be trained in basic journalism: finding good data, confirming
stories with two independent sources, using quotes responsibly, and
eschewing anonymity - that is, standing by their own bylines, as
conventional reporters do.
This is how citizens can be taken - and take themselves - seriously as
documenters and investigators of our common situation. In a time of
official lies, healthy investigative energy should shed light, not just
generate heat.
Naomi Wolf, the author of The End of America: Letter of Warning to a
Young Patriot and Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American
Revolutionaries, is co-founder of the American Freedom Campaign, a US
democracy movement.
www.guatemala-times.com/opinion/syndicated/the-next-wave/483-a-conspiracy-so-immense.html
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theory
fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Théorie_du_complot
kleine voorkeur voor de franse , (plaatjes) en door het lezen van
www.athenaeum.nl/recensies/umberto-eco-de-begraafplaats-van-praag
Informatie in stukjes
Grote brokken informatie toedienen, de
lezer zodanig overvoeren dat hij het overzicht verliest, is een
strategie die Simone zelf ook toepast. Gedurende zijn leven werkt hij
aan een anti-Joods geschrift, een zogenaamd verslag van een fictieve
samenzwering op een joodse begraafplaats in Praag van rabbijnen die
plannen smeden om in heel Europa grote macht te verwerven. Het verslag
is gebaseerd op de werkelijk bestaande
Protocollen van de wijzen van Zion, waaruit Hitler in
Mein Kampf
als bron heeft geput. Simonini stuurt zijn Protocollen stukje bij
beetje de wereld in, waarbij steeds nieuwe, snode 'onthullingen' van de
rabbijnen naar buiten komen.
'Als je explosieve informatie in één keer toedient, slaat
die weliswaar in als een bom, maar zijn de mensen alles binnen de
kortste keren weer vergeten. Je moet de berichten daarom mondjesmaat
verstrekken, want dan zal elk nieuw bericht het voorgaande weer in
herinnering roepen.'
Met de totstandkoming van de
protocollen geeft Eco een prachtig inzicht in de groei van het
antisemitisme tegen het einde van de negentiende eeuw. Maar de inzet
van
De begraafplaats van Praag voert breder. Informatie is een
tijdloos thema dat nu, met WikiLeaks, weer bijzonder actueel is. Wie
heeft de macht over informatie, welke informatie besluit je te
verspreiden, wat is het effect op het publiek? Of het feitelijke of
fictieve informatie is (zoals Simonini's Protocollen), doet daarbij
niet eens ter zake:
De begraafplaats van Praag laat zien hoe
moeiteloos waarheid en verzinsels door elkaar lopen. Iedereen, van
journalisten tot politici, pikt er het materiaal uit dat voor hem
relevant is, om zijn eigen boodschap mee te ondersteunen
Nineteenth-century
Europe - from Turin to Prague to Paris - abounds with the ghastly and
the mysterious. Conspiracies rule history. Jesuits plot against
Freemasons. Italian republicans strangle priests with their own
intestines. French criminals plan bombings by day and celebrate black
masses at night.
Every
nation has its own secret service, perpetrating forgeries, plots, and
massacres. From the unification of Italy to the Paris Commune to the
Dreyfus Affair to notorious forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
Europe is in tumult and everyone needs a scapegoat. But what if,
behind all of these conspiracies both real and imagined, lay one lone
man?
And
what if that evil genius created the most infamous document of all?
Eco takes his readers on an unforgettable journey through the
underbelly of world-shattering events. "The Prague Cemetery" is Umberto
Eco at his most exciting, a novel immediately hailed as his
masterpiece.
een kritisch oog :
Political use
In a paper written in 2008, Cass Sunstein, legal scholar, and Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, wrote of appropriate government responses to conspiracy theories. In the paper he stated:
What can government do about conspiracy theories? Among the things it
can do, what should it do? We can readily imagine a series of possible
responses. (1) Government might ban conspiracy theorizing. (2)
Government might impose some kind of tax, financial or otherwise, on
those who disseminate such theories. (3) Government might itself engage
in counterspeech, marshaling arguments to discredit conspiracy
theories. (4) Government might formally hire credible private parties
to engage in counterspeech. (5) Government might engage in informal
communication with such parties, encouraging them to help. Each
instrument has a distinctive set of potential effects, or costs and
benefits, and each will have a place under imaginable conditions.
However, our main policy idea is that government should engage in
cognitive infiltration of the groups that produce conspiracy theories,
which involves a mix of (3), (4) and (5)
vooral dat dus : However, our main policy idea is that government
should engage in cognitive infiltration of the groups that produce
conspiracy theories
Naomi Wolf, the author, most recently, of The End of America: Letter
of Warning to a Young Patriot and the forthcoming Give me Liberty: How
to Become an American Revolutionary, is co-founder of the American
Freedom Campaign, a US democracy movement. 