Thursday, January 13, 2011

Wikileaks and the pointlessness of it all..

Information is often a slow acting weapon, making but an infinitesimal dent on its target .It attains its fullest purpose only when it is constantly reinforced and allowed to endure on a scale of multiple generations.In both totalitarian and democratic societies, this characteristic is often used to the fullest effect, writing over inconvenient truths and reinforcing convenient half truths.

In our own recent history, we see multiple examples of the limited effects of information. The first,much celebrated leak was that of the Pentagon Papers.Over the time since the leak, their impact moved from the front pages of a daily newspaper, to the footnotes of academia. All references to it have been expunged from popular consciousness and the United States found itself in Iraq. Information lost that battle.

A big example of the complete and utter uselessness of information is the effect of internet on China. Much was bandied of the effect of internet on the urban youth. But I have read and found that many chinese believe what their government , rather than what NY times tells them. That battle never seems to have begun.

The newest and possibly the most extreme example is the Wikileaks Cable dump. A mass of hundreds of thousands of documents, many of which will be a trove for a graduate student, but not for the average reader. The scale of this leak, in some sense puts it apart from all other leaks.
But what is the consequence of wikileaks? Its possibly another battle lost. We already see much of it disappearing from the front pages and the prime time, having exhausted the short attention span of the news cycle and possibly actively suppressed by the governments of the world. The information will continue to circulate for a long time, feeding only the appetites of governments, academia and the UFO worshipping conspiracy junkie.

But perhaps I err on the side of cynicism. Maybe all is not lost. I read today that Tunisians, angered by details of corruption in their authoritarian government, are leading a revolt against it.

But I think being the skeptic is the safe bet here. The premise that the availability of information can have an impact is relevant mostly for rational beings. Human beings are not rational. We make our decisions not on fact, but on our prejudices and emotions. Information that does not reinforce our prejudices is discarded. Only information that lingers long enough for the next generation to absorb is likely to make a difference. We live in a world, where useful information is actively scrubbed from the mainline discourse. We live in a world, where information only has a half life of sixty minutes.

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