We keep telling ourselves that we are in the age of information, but the fact is that we are poorly informed. Because most of the information is deliberately manipulated. Because information management is often careless, repetitive and shallow – handled by people who are ignorant on the subject and don’t bother to check their sources as thoroughly as they should. Or because our “mental filter”, or instinctive laziness, makes us perceive and understand only what fits our usual beliefs and biases.
One
of the worst forms of ignorance is the assumption of knowledge. Just
as people who never notice their own stupidity are very stupid,
people who never understand that they don’t know are desperately
ignorant.
Socrates
used to say: "the more I know, the more I know that I don’t
know". That’s a good reason to believe that he was very
intelligent – and much more knowledgeable than people who think
they “know it all.”
This
is one of many “cultural viruses” that spread in all information
systems – old an new. And there is an exaggerated habit of
spreading them without checking. Pseudo-news (false or deformed) can
be generated in many ways. It can start as a joke, a mistake, a case
of superficial reporting – or deliberate manipulation. There is no
way of wiping out these diseases; they exist and will continue to
multiply. What’s worrying is that they survive and expand with such
uncontrolled success.
Not
pirates, not even hackers, because the real frontier is not
technological – it’s cultural and human. Idea buccaneers,
knowledge privateers, nimble squirrels of imagination.
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