There is an elephant in the room — and it is persuasion. Until we come to grips with its role in Western society, we cannot tackle issues associated with the shaping of the information environment.
Something has been bothering me a lot lately. Let’s call it my elephant 🐘 in the room. It’s a big elephant. This elephant is there at government hearings grilling tech company representatives (some more successfully so than others).The same elephant haunts announcements promising to address disinformation. And there, behind the often sensationalist media coverage showcasing evidence of attempts to shape the information environment lurks that very elephant, unmentioned amidst all the accusations and blame.
This elephant in the room did not start out big. He has grown over time, mostly from a nagging unease stemming from our seeming inability, as a society, to fully appreciate the ‘other’ side of what the evolution of information communication technologies (ICT) and the borderless flow of information it afforded brought with it.
The understanding driving me to say we have an elephantine problem emerged when research I conducted led me to predict Trump’s win back in January 2016. While my prediction was based on Ellul’s concept of sociological propaganda, my subsequent research led me to a model for how the information space…
