A Fun Parable About Leprechauns and Information Manipulation

Ask most people what comes to mind when they hear the words “information manipulation” and you’ll likely get only one response: Censorship. While certainly a form of information manipulation, it is hardly the only one. It’s not even the most effective technique. Censorship’s two cousins — information friction and information flooding — are much more common and vastly more effective. In this article, we’ll travel to China to learn how both information friction and information flooding help the government manage its sprawling bureaucracy. Then we’ll hop a plane back to the United States to see how both techniques are at work in our culture as well. Finally, we will examine the our responsibility to recognize information friction and information flooding at work against (or in) their organizations.

Information manipulation is a provocative topic. It stirs strong emotions — closing our minds to the underlying methods before we have a chance to discover how it works. That’s unfortunate. Unless we understand information manipulation, we cannot address it. To help explore the issues at play without triggering our natural defense mechanisms, I’ll start with Linda Shute’s version of the story of Clever Tom and the Leprechaun (Scholastic, 1988).

Once upon a time…

…Clever Tom found himself walking in…