Finding truth in the fog of narrative warfare
With our communication tools weaponised against us, an emergent approach to narrative analysis may hold the key to understanding ourselves… and each other.
Stories have been fundamental in humans becoming the custodial species of this planet. They are how we make sense of what is going on and help us decide what to do next.
At first, they were contained within tribes and highly localised, but then (like the proverbial genie in the bottle) we escaped beyond tribal boundaries, and so did they. Their spread allowed us to collaborate and organise on an immense scale as stories were fed through mass networks, bound together by the hegemonic narratives of the time.
Stories began with the spoken word. The written word kept a record but froze narratives like a snapshot. Then the printing press took documented hegemonic narratives to the masses, and broadcast media made them global. Now we’re in the age of the internet and social media where it is a full-time job to discern signal from noise.
Each of these evolutionary phases shaped our culture, our perceptions of reality and even how we think.
“In the long run, a medium’s content matters less than the medium itself in influencing how we think and act.” Nicholas Carr
The quote above was Carr’s expansion on Marshall McLuhan’s more succinct, “The medium is the message” that has echoed through the last 50 years, and is now more relevant than ever.
Each phase followed hot on the heels of the other with an exponential quickening. Think back to the early 1990s when the internet was taking hold and consider how much it has influenced culture in only 30 years. Now for a real mind-blower. Think how rapidly social media has changed and polarised our media, cultural, and political landscape since 2010.
The internet is a cultural accelerant, and it shows no sign of stopping.
The dominant social platforms monopolising our attention have man-child CEOs at the helm, unleashing their Frankensteins upon us to furiously scale, make bank, and to hell with the consequences. With the Silicon Valley MO of ‘scale, scale, scale’, introducing any kind of filtering or editorial standards would only create friction. And friction impedes scale.
So they automated everything.
Automation has infected our info ecology with algorithms geared toward outrage deciding what we do and don’t see. The business model sells our attention to advertisers and is powered by micro-targeted ad tech informed by psychometric profiles mined from our likes. Meanwhile, bots and troll farms pump out misinfo, disinfo, conspiracy theories and hate speech to the extent that not only can the algorithms not moderate it, they actively promote it.
A Memetic Arms Race To The Bottom
This broken info ecology has balkanised the tribal landscape to something resembling pre-WWI Europe and has ushered in a new kind of multi-polar narrative warfare.
The forces battling it out on this narrative combat zone are:
- States intervening to geopolitical ends
- Politicians/Governments
- Corporations/corporate lobbyists/think tanks
- Corporate media/media moguls
- Social media platforms
- Independent/new/digital media orgs
- Troll farms/bots
- Grassroots: activist groups/memetic tribes
Even the so-called neutral and objective arbiters of truth, journalists, are increasingly being dragged into this paradigm.
Social media has fast-tracked this evolution into what Peter Limberg has dubbed ‘Culture War 2.0’, where the simple left vs right dynamic has splintered into memetic tribes — each with their own narratives, triggers and reality tunnels. The image below is just a taster. His article ‘The Memetic Tribes Of Culture War 2.0’ co-written with Conor Barnes is a gripping deep deep dive as is his chat with Rebel Wisdom in the Culture War 2.0 film.
With exponential narratives relentlessly cascading upon us, it is impossible to keep track of what is going on. This firehose resembles a DDOS (Distributed Denial-of-Service), where hackers send so many requests to a website that it effectively knocks it offline. Instead, it is our own minds, mental health and sensemaking capabilities that are being co-opted and knocked offline.
Daniel Schmachtenberger frames this as potentially self-terminating. With multiplying technology, growing population and increasing impact per person, we’re making more consequential choices with worse and worse information to inform our decisions. “Like running increasingly fast through the woods while getting increasingly blind”.
And given the growing cognitive complexity of all this, we have understandably been outsourcing our sensemaking to third parties.
As a communications strategist, I can assure you that most of the info you’re receiving is strategic. In “The War on Sensmaking” film, Schmachtenberger reminds us that the signals we’re receiving are strategic on the part of the agent sharing the info. They are strategic for their purposes, not yours. And the real problems arise when there is a misalignment between your well-being and theirs.
Like mindfulness practice, we need to apply a constant awareness around the info we’re consuming:
- What are they sharing?
- Who is sharing it?
- What was their source info and can it be independently verified?
- What are their biases?
- Why are they sharing this info at this particular time?
- What’s their intention/agenda?
Phoebe Tickell, during our Reunion sensemaking session on this very topic, made the salient point that if we’re passively and uncritically absorbing information, then we can be easily manipulated. So it is important that we work on our sensemaking practice, just as we have an ecology of practice to maintain our mental, spiritual or physical health.
Phoebe recently posted an excellent Sensemaking 101 that expands on the above if you would like to delve deeper.
Narrative Galaxies
It’s one thing to understand media bias, filter bubbles (and sites such as Allsides do a great job of illustrating that), but we’re still caught up in the eddies and currents of the info-torrent.
We need to step back and look at the meta-narrative, see all the sides of the narrative field, and understand the narratives and the themes objectively.
Fortunately, new tech and methods to analyse these fields of narrative are emerging.
Wired’s analysis on how Anti-Vaxxers used Twitter to manipulate a vaccine bill showed just how quickly and effectively entrenched tropes can flip over to a new, more sticky narrative. The graphs are stunning too:
Social media researcher and multimedia artist Erin Gallagher took a similar approach to show how COVID misinformation spread across Facebook for the launch of the Plandemic film.
These narrative graphs (or narrative galaxies, I’ve started to call them) have captured my imagination. And it’s not just that they look like galaxies in the macro sense and the neural networks of our brain in the micro. I believe they have the potential to explain ourselves to ourselves. A potential that hasn’t been realised yet.
Pattern recognition in narrative has become something of an unconscious skill I have picked up throughout my career, it’s like a Spidey sense. But an exciting and new kind of narrative analysis is emerging, a memetic science even.
Humans aren’t robots and while narratives might be patterns, they are not algorithms. For all this to cohere, we must move beyond the science and fill-in the gaps with what Nora Bateson calls ‘warm data’ — all the interrelationships that integrate elements of a complex system. The next challenge is to effectively communicate this truth-telling so that it becomes a ‘knowing’ that is not only understood, but also felt. We need to weave in art like Erin Gallagher, warm data like Nora Bateson and even the mythopoetic like Tyson Yunkaporta.
As the galaxy in my own mind was forming on this, I happened to be reading Tyson Yunkaporta’s mind-blowing ‘Sand Talk’. I was reading his Chapter on ‘Lines In The Sand’ when a passage leapt out at me. Here he talks about the wisdom of a local Elder in Western Australia:
“His process is all about the overall shape of the connection between things. Look beyond the things and focus on the connections between them. Then look beyond the connections and see the patterns they make.”
Tyson didn't directly write this in the context of narrative, but the foundation of Australian Indigenous lore and ways of thinking are stories and songlines. They’re the spoken kind of narrative, more social, unstructured, multisensory and therefore promote connection over separation.
All of this hints towards the possibilities of this emerging field.
Right when our tools of communication have been corrupted into weapons to be used against us in this narrative warfare, new tools have come along to help us rise above this meat grinder of misinformation. Maybe they can help us dance with the algorithms instead of being manipulated by them, or running away from them.
Match that to a new approach of pattern recognition and mapping of warm data to discern signal from noise and we have the potential to not only help us reveal truth, but also chart the rapid evolution of society, humanity, and maybe even our consciousness.
In amidst all the noise, I find myself wanting to venture into a deep line of enquiry, to dance with the data and expand my internal sensemaking universe. So here at reunion.earth we’re kicking off Project Narrative to explore this emerging frontier with some of its pioneers, artists, elders, scientists, poets, strategists, wisdom holders (and maybe the odd shaman).
Watch this ‘space’ if you would like to follow us on this journey.
And get in touch if you would like to lend your skills or get involved with Project Narrative in any way.
Many of the themes discussed in this piece were explored in our Reunion sensemaking session on this topic with Phoebe Tickell (renegade scientist, systems designer and social entrepreneur) and Felipe Viveros (Researcher and Artivist with Culture Hack Labs)
And finally, this is a reunion and everyone is invited, it’s up to you how you show up. Visit reunion.earth to find out how you can join us.
