Tom Harrison
Aug 26, 2017 · 2 min read

The importance of democratization of information via technology seems key to the way I understand our current world.

I believe that it has created opportunities and encouraged the spread of a great, wide spectrum of voices. If those voices had not been heard, it seems to me the world would look far differently today.

Whether real or metaphorical, the ruling equating corporations to people strongly supports your position that corporations are accumulating power without us knowing how much, nor being particularly aware.

However, the truly democratic aspect of this access is revealing something else — the people who speak loudest get the most attention. In this case, “loudness” might include frequency of repetition, boldness of message, quality/nuance, stridency, polarity, and volume. Corporations can pay for any of these.

But it seems to be true that money is not as important. People having very limited resources have opportunities to create self-forming groups of like-minded people. These are very powerful groups, as extreme views can be easily normalized and assimilated. Corporate views tend to optimize for the largest share of the market at the expense of specificity. Individual groups have focus, so may be smaller but may become far more intense. I would argue that the imbalance is not as great as you seem to believe.

Instead maybe a broader view is that we must distrust nearly all of the information spewed at us, or placed in our path by an interested party or algorithm. This is frightening because it seems clear that a very small subset of our population has the energy, will, or wherewithal to adjust behavior accordingly.

In a sense, the social contract has been broken, or at least changed to be very different. That is, in the past we felt that we could trust the larger community and culture to guide us, mainly through media and less under influence by corporations. Many still do.

We used to trust, so we often still do, even though trust is far less warranted than ever.

If the balance has shifted because corporations control media and individuals have broad powers to publish their media then we are beginning to see the result in new ways.

For example, Obama came to office gaining power in one new way of using the Internet, manifesting as small donations. Trump may have come to power through the wiley use of technologies like Twitter and big data analytics, plus Fox, Breitbart, and forums like 4chan or even Reddit. These technologies provide power in the form of political will and support.

If our current power structures have directed by the forces of corporate power and will, I must say they have done a rather miserable job of it. If, instead they have risen up more as a result of the chaos of democratized information, then the outcome so far seems far more predictable. Of course both forces are present. The question in my mind is which has how much influence.

Thank you for making me think.

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Tom Harrison

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