Information and Control

1. Information-Motion-Distortion

Information, a general definition:

Mathematics and the "information sciences" define information in terms of "negative entropy" — as something unpredictable, but not random. Instead, in defining and seeking "information" we look for organisation and coherence from a background of unpredictability and/or chaos. If you can predict something in this context it does not necessarily count as "information." If however, you experience something new, unpredicted, yet organised and coherent, this would count as "information."

The root meaning of "news"— a contraction of "new things" refers to information in this sense.

Life itself requires information. For life to exist, it must behave as an ordering, selecting coherence making process — as information.

If information in the sense described above provides an essential, if not the essential ingredient for survival, for development and coping strategies and indeed, for the arising and sustaining of life itself, then we have an imperative to investigate and decide how much information we have available to us, and how we can obtain more. On this understanding, the more we have, the greater our adaptability and importantly, range of choice.

To apply an example oft used in philosophy to illustrate this: In order for me to exit my room, negotiate my way to the kitchen, make a hot beverage and then return to my room successfully, I require information. My brain must seek cues, coherent and organising precepts out of the mass of incoming sense-data in order to complete this task easily. Our senses provide information about our immediate environment and enable us to act effectively and effortlessly within most environments in which we find ourselves. The senses when applied in the immediate vicinity thus give us a relatively reliable information gathering ability.

And yet — at least for most of the people reading this, our individual lives stretch so much further than our immediate environs. We must gather and apply information on so many subjects and other individuals in order to live and develop successfully. We must also transmit information. To ease discussion of this I would like to propose a brief definition here. In the context of the gathering and transmission of information beyond a) our immediate environment and b) our immediate survival needs, I would like to refer to this expanded context as "social information" as opposed to "immediate information" (sensory information).

With regard to survival, obviously, in the short term, immediate information provides our essential survival input. The long term however, especially with regard to individual development and adaptation, requires reliable sources of social information — and alas, our senses play too small a role in the acquisition of such information. I must point out here that even with the most obvious tasks achieved by our senses, such as distinguishing the title of one book from another, our brains make a "gamble" and effectively create the information for us.

Our sense perceptions do not equal the objects themselves, and as such our brains have some sort of creative licence with regard to presenting data to the conscious mind. If you find this counterintuitive, consider the difference in information received about a table from your sense of vision and sense of touch respectively. Does either one of these grasp the "reality" of the table any better than the other? No. Our brain makes a gamble for us — both in terms of how to present the incoming data for each sense to conscious awareness and in terms of how the brain links the two sets of perceptions.

One can however, consider these "gambles" made with regard to immediate information as relatively small when compared to the "gambles" made with regard to social information. In the latter case we no longer refer to things in the same scale, dimensions, or even what some might call the same sense-perceptible continuum. A key characteristic of social information makes fools of us often, the characteristic of making gambles at a distance.

The degree of separation between you and your source(s) of social information can vary greatly. One might consider an example of little separation in the case of a neighbour informing you that a friend of yours who lives in a nearby street fell ill recently and now remains bedridden. You can easily walk to the said street and visit your friend — who appears most definitely bedridden as your senses and indeed they themselves reliably inform you.

Already we see an important degree of separation though, especially if you did not decide to visit or otherwise contact your friend. In this case, you rely upon testimony for which your senses can offer no direct verification. Instead you must rely upon other previously gathered social information regarding the reliability of your neighbour — who you may regard as a more or less reliable source of information according to countless factors, including some that you can verify with your senses, e.g. your neighbours’ externally visible actions and body language.

One can see a greater degree of separation if one considers a similar scenario, but instead a stranger at the local bar informs you of the same event, which in this case occurs to a friend who lives in another city. Electronic or telecommunications notwithstanding, your investment of time, effort and energy to verify this through "immediate" means would have increased somewhat in this example, and even more factors must come under consideration for the testimony of the stranger. I will not rehearse the extra factors, suffice to say that I believe your imagination can certainly cycle adequately through many of the contingencies and possibilities. I hope that these two examples start to make my point apparent:

In terms of social information we, as individuals, must make a certain investment in time and energy in order to directly verify any propositions conveyed to us concerning events beyond our immediate environs — or at least directly verify them to our personal satisfaction. (Some propositions such as "the Afghan people support the Taliban" one can only verify for oneself in a very approximate fashion, even if one had the opportunity to meet a great many Afghans and could clearly identify the meaning of "Afghan people.")

As the degree of separation between us and the source/object of the proposition/assertion increases, so does the requisite time and energy for direct verification. Some cases we may never have the opportunity to directly verify. We thus move into potentially dangerous territory here — which sources of testimony do we accept as reliable enough for us to forgo direct verification? Scientific and academic standards require certain qualities de rigueur in these scenarios. Evidence, solid arguments from said evidence to conclusions, thoroughness in investigations, the elimination of mitigating factors and reliability (as in repeatability) constitute but a few of the factors required in the forming of scholarly and scientific conclusions suitable for transmission as social information.

Yet much of the social information we receive not only defies categorisation in scientific-academic nomenclature, but also concerns subjects that one simply cannot apply those selfsame qualities to in order to assess its validity. In fact, one of the most common characteristics of social information appears as the reliance of one source upon another source, or testimony. For example, consider the notion of "official position." One may speak of the "official position" of the British consulate in Nigeria. No doubt one would already rely upon one "source," such as a BBC correspondent, to convey this. The correspondent in question may well rely themselves upon a "source" within the consulate. And so on.

One could perhaps only verify "the official position" through direct communication with the director of the consulate, with some kind of official guarantee such as the director’s claim in writing, written and signed before one headed on writing a paper. But immediately one may think — even this does not guarantee 100% that you have the definitive account of the consulate’s current position. One can see so many many factors at work here. Sometimes in scientific endeavour and most of the time in mathematics, one can at least come workably close to a claim of complete certainty — at least as far as any human can.

This gives us an important characteristic of social information — that at some point in the chain, if we deal with social information that constitutes "a source about a source" (e.g. the "official position" of the British consulate in Nigeria), and most social information will have this characteristic, then we always deal with a "gamble" made by one or more sources in the chain. (Did the contact in the consulate really know the final position laid down by the director? Could they have misinterpreted this? And so forth.) This constitutes distorting factor number one: chains of sources in social information. Let us now consider two more distorting factors:

Distorting factor number two: interference.

Unfortunately this factor has the characteristic of appearing inevitably in any system involving transmission of information. In the context I refer to here, interference does not constitute or include interpretation of data in any way (I shall deal with that in a later part). Instead, here I refer to effects upon the raw data itself — effects that one finds in the media and/or method used to transmit information.

To put it succinctly, as Claude Shannon demonstrated [1], "noise" gets into any and every communication channel. Electronic interference, mechanical failure and crossed channels scramble and modify the signals sent to televisions, radios, mobile phones and even some email clients. "Noise" appears in printed text as "typos" — some more serious than others. Web pages, of course, provide an interesting example here as one can edit pages and retransmit them, thus avoiding typographical errors per se — yet a particular browser may have difficulty interpreting some of the HTML code embedded in the web page and immediately we see interference/noise once again. This latter kind of interference may never reach the attention of the webmaster as only a particular combination of hardware/software configurations may (and often does) cause such interference to occur.

Distorting factor number three: availability of sources.

When one has to make a decision, the number and quality of sources available becomes crucial. Many such resources may permanently remain beyond the cognizance of people who would benefit from making decisions or coming to conclusions based upon them. If one lacked awareness of the existence of libraries for example, this would mean a valuable source of evidence would remain untapped. But this provides a crude example.

Many of the sources we could use to verify or falsify social information, although abundantly available, may as well not exist if we do not know about them. Very few people have enough training or education in law for example to know that a myriad of benefits, tax breaks and the like are available. The internet points the way towards some kind of general panacea in this respect, although in and of itself it does not provide the actual solution — only indicating the direction — as the medium contains so much disinformation and irrelevancy that we must continue to evaluate and find our valid information through the old fashioned path of hard work.

But aside from the unavailability of sources of which we remain unaware, how many sources do actually have in common awareness? Immediately, one thinks of television, radio, the printed media. It may seem tempting to append "the internet" to this "commonly available" list, however, I will not as unfortunately the internet still only remains a source available to the minority, even in many Western nations.

One can append, however, friends, family and other humans with whom one comes into contact on a daily basis (e.g. work colleagues, shop assistants, customers). One must immediately ask, however, where do other people in one’s social circle (broadly understood) gain most of their social information? Television, radio, and the printed media. Depending entirely of course on the kind of social circle one chooses (in as far as one can choose), the capacity for new reliable sources of social information external to the "big three" remains relatively low. Most "news" as in "new information" that one will encounter from one’s social circle will mostly come from television, radio and printed media and — worse — when this information comes through a social circle, unless one picks ones friends and contacts very carefully, the original information derived from the latter media becomes subject to "Chinese whispers" and embellishment particularly if the person(s) passing on this information feel it sufficiently/insufficiently shocking.

Here we strike a rich vein of problems. These sources have a large amount of control exhibited upon them. Aside from any other considerations, they remain subject to law with regard to what they can or cannot show. In the UK for example, a contact of mine at the BBC recently informed me that one of the nation’s most hard-hitting news programmes, Newsnight, gets served with a "D-Notice" roughly once per month. (We can of course argue recursively here with regard to the factors impinging on my sources but I won’t enter that quagmire till a later section in this series.) A "D-Notice" means crudely a "gag order" that the government can issue to any media/journalistic outlet to prevent it issuing information on a particular subject, usually with the much overused caveat that this occurs "in the interest of national security."

Now the example of D-Notices gives us a clear indication of the intervention of law in the main sources of ‘social information’ available to us. What about other direct influences? Well, having involvement recently in a BBC documentary on young peoples' views of war, I saw first hand how the "soundbite" works. Many of the most important concepts and ideas I found glossed over or missed entirely in favour of providing something entertaining and easy to follow. Of course, the job of the producers, directors and editors involved as a priority making something topical, but at the same time entertaining so that people would watch it. They had the incredibly difficult task of condensing literally days of footage into one hour.

And yet the point remains. The said documentary provides only one example of something that occurs every day by necessity of the demands of television (and indeed other media), as a result of the need to provide quick entertainment. Almost every programme one watches will include gross oversimplifications and very much of relevance missed in the interests of providing quick, easy and digestible television. Most worryingly, this tendency appears to have taken over the pure news programmes also, rather than remaining in the reserved arena of pure entertainment. In the last decade in particular, news programmes which previously needed to make no excuse for dryness or lack of entertainment have become the victims of the lowest common denominator. In favour of presenting a balanced position — which may require extra depth on the subject — we see an increasing tendency to the "short and sweet."

We may hear shocking quotes from individuals in the "public eye" (something which interestingly implies choice on the part of the public regarding which "celebrities" the media will report upon), but we won’t hear — unless we search hard for ourselves — what else they may have said, and how the quote gets taken out of context.

One will more than likely find more in depth treatment of certain subjects through the mediums of radio and printed media. However, this automatically includes a proportional increase in the effort required to extract the information. (I know for example that I most certainly don’t have time to read a broadsheet news paper every day from cover to cover; I have to settle for picking out particular sections and stories I wish to follow.) Additionally, even these media sources remain subject to the same restrictions as television, albeit often to a lesser degree, though this lesser degree often becomes predicated on one actually selecting the correct radio station or newspaper for more in-depth and thoughtful coverage.

Ultimately, the point I wish to draw attention to here as distorting factor number three in the social information stakes amounts to this: we all tend to share the same primary sources for social information. The said sources have controls, conditions and filters placed upon them. The said sources also form the main source for and mechanism of many people's belief and opinion forming processes. This applies to many of the people with whom one will come into contact each day, and as such very few new ideas will enter the pool. Those ideas currently in circulation will continue through a group enforcement, repetition and embellishment. If then, most of us most of the time use "the big three" (television, radio, and printed media) as their primary source(s) of social information and these sources remain subject to external control, does this not then mean that most of us, most of the time only see a very particular model of the world and events around us and as such remain blind?

"A person does what he does because he sees the world as he sees it."
— Alfred Korzybski

As for the why and how of the control of information, I shall deal with that in Parts Three and Four of this series, "The Importance of Motivation" and "Techniques Used Against Us: Associations, Inversions and Urban Myths." For now I wished the reader only to consider the frightening general limitations that exist upon our sources of information prior to specific interference or interests at work.

— Danny Weston, aka Darios

1. Shannon, Claude, The Mathematical Theory of Communication, University of Illinois Press, 1948. [back]

Darios wrote the above piece in E-Prime.

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previously published on February 3, 2002
page re-created on June 18, 2006
page updated June 18, 2006 20:06 EST

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