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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

information

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Behind 45’s latest ban

The United States is weaponizing interdependence. —Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman

From the Washington Post today: “The United States is weaponizing interdependence.”

We live in an interdependent world, where global networks span across countries, creating enormous benefits, but also great disparities of power. As networks grow, they tend to concentrate both influence and vulnerability in a few key locations, creating enormous opportunities for states, regulators and nonstate actors who have leverage over those locations.

“In this context, the United States is plausibly leveraging its control over access to U.S. airports, which are central ‘nodes’ in the global network of air travel between different destinations. It is using this control to attack the key vulnerabilities of other networked actors, by going after the central nodes in their networks (the hub airports) and potentially severely damaging them.” —Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman

Several of the last few presidential orders and directives have targeted migration, immigration, and transit. The usual political critics have panned these orders, and the usual political allies have praised them.

But as the Conference on College Composition and Communication and the Rhetorical Society of America noted earlier this year, the free movement of people is as important to society as is the free exchange of ideas.

Good decisions also involve both careful deliberation and integrity, neither of which seems to be common practice in the public sector this year. What Farrell and Newman propose is that the US’ ban on large mobile devices and laptops to and from 10 MENA airports is at least as retaliatory as it is security-driven (it could be both, of course).

It’s a testament to our times that “retaliation” isn’t a completely preposterous idea for a new transit policy like this. If, like some of my colleagues, you’re going to have to travel to the MENA region over the next few months, consider these strategies for protecting your equipment and data.

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The limits of belief

There are facts, and there are beliefs, and there are things you want so badly to believe that they become as facts to you. —Julie Beck
In a recent The Atlantic article on resilient beliefs, Julie Beck writes, “There are facts, and there are beliefs, and there are things you want so badly to believe that they become as facts to you… People often don’t engage with information as information but as a marker of identity.”

Humans have many superpowers. One of them is the power to transmute ideals into perceptions and perceptions into matter. What we wish were so becomes what we acknowledge in the world around us. What we acknowledge in the world then becomes part of the world itself as we stack routines, resources, and policies around our beliefs.

In Europe, for example, the belief that a nation or corporation is stronger when its residents or members hold similar ideologies and cultural practices leads to the perception that overtly distinct residents are Other to Us.

The perception of Otherness inspires laws that pressures those people to un-differentiate themselves to fit in, perhaps by removing religious clothing at work or in public spaces.

Restrictions on visible difference in the name of “neutrality” in turn squeeze minoritized people out of public space, and their marginalization ultimately reinforces their Othered status.

Very little in the way of facts is likely to change a French person convinced that Muslims don’t belong in France whether they were born in the country or joined it as immigrants.

Prejudices are resistant to direct rebuttal, Beck explains, and so too are beliefs. We have to be intentional about seeking out information that contradicts our beliefs or appears to put our survival or community ties at risk: absorbing contrary, belief-challenging information won’t happen by itself.

People see evidence that disagrees with them as weaker, because ultimately, they’re asking themselves fundamentally different questions when evaluating that evidence, depending on whether they want to believe what it suggests or not, according to psychologist Tom Gilovich. ‘For desired conclusions,’ he writes, ‘it is as if we ask ourselves “Can I believe this?”, but for unpalatable conclusions we ask, “Must I believe this?”‘ People come to some information seeking permission to believe, and to other information looking for escape routes.”

Read the rest on The Atlantic. The data on trust is particularly sobering.

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“The first rewrite of the draft of history”

Cartoon of open newspaper with "Correction" advertisement: "The Downing St memo seems to be at odds with pretty much anything you remember seeing and hearing in the media in the runup to the Iraq war. Your memory is in error. We regret your mistake.
Tom Toles’ “The first draft of the rewrite of history” (July 2005)

Tom Toles has drawn editorial cartoons for the Washington Post since 2002. The Post published “The first rewrite of the draft of history” in 2005 after British papers broke news about “highly sensitive” meetings of British intelligence officers, Cabinet members, political strategists, and communications specialists, and representatives of the United States.

At these meetings, later minuted in the aforementioned “memo,” US officials reportedly outlined their commitment to pursuing war in Iraq. July 2002 was long before the US government had secured Congressional approval for a military intervention.

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.” —Matthew Rycroft, July 23, 2002

Within three years of this memo, the British parliament convened two inquiries into how the government talked about weapons of mass destruction and managed intelligence data-collection. The country had to wait 14 more years to get reports from a third inquiry that focused on the war itself and required key members of the Blair administration to answer for their decisions about it.

In those 14 years, I moved to the US, completed one degree, started another, studied and published on the government’s mash-up of rhetoric and the “science” of secret intelligence, and moved across country again.

Over that same period, people involved in designing the Iraq invasion kept busy rewriting conventional wisdom about it.

So I wasn’t altogether surprised this week to see US Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi make claims about the US intelligence community that didn’t match the history or government inquiry findings or my own memory. It reminded me of Toles’ cartoon, which so pointedly pokes at the stories administrations weave for themselves—and then expect us all to believe.

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Raising our information standards

Mailboxes in the foreground.As long as there’s been an internet, people have forwarded one another stories and photos and award offers, some inspiring, some horrifying, some valid, some fictional.

What some reporters are now calling “fake news” is a sub-category of the content we information traders are willing to traffic in and share with each other. During this fall’s US elections, enterprising Greek teenagers capitalized on United States readers’ willingness to read and share unsubstantiated stories. Some of these teens have made thousands of dollars per month from advertising on their fictional news sites. It’s an especially cynical combination of politics, capitalism, and folly. It’s also a kind of propaganda, and many of us are much more susceptible to it than we’d imagine we are.

Professor and writer Zeynep Tufekci has explained the big part this small group of young people played on social media during the campaigns thanks to the public’s willingness to look, click, and share, often without reading or researching the content first. Perhaps only in the future will it be clear how much misinformation like this shaped the outcomes of this election.

We can’t go backward and stop writers from creating false information. But each of us can challenge ourselves to take more care when we encounter new material—even and especially from sources that we already trust or agree with.

I’ve taken this month as a perfect time to voluntarily raise my information standards. If dissembling and bluffing are going to become the next great international sports, we all need to be much better prepared to recognize it and shut it down.

Read more about Facebook and patterns of misinformation.

Also check out Naomi Oreskes and Erik  M. Conway’s historical book on information manipulation during the heyday of tobacco. Merchants of Doubt also reviews other science controversies including nuclear safety and climate change.

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Why information fails

A close-up photo of a wide grey rope tangled on the floor.
Photo credit: Tim Boote

Last month, the London Guardian reported that the mantra of the Brexit campaigners was “Facts don’t work… You have got to connect with people emotionally.”

MSNBC’s Maddow Show contributors also fretted about this political information approach spreading to Europe from the United States. But emotion-heavy, data-light appeals have long been part of British and continental European politics: propaganda isn’t an American invention!

Is this really what we’re exporting? Assurances that ‘facts don’t work,’ ‘the Trump success’ is a model worthy of emulation, and subject-matter experts are better left ignored?'” —Steven Benen

I invested eight years in learning the arts and science of informing people. Technical communication is about effective information; rhetoric is about effective persuasion. And while the two fields are so related I could take coursework in the same program and from the same cohort of instructors, they are distinct.

We learn from both fields to handle information with respect and not to use information structures to mislead, obscure, or harm. There’s something deeply unsettling about graduating out of such a program and into a public sphere that does not seem to value “facts.”

But there are psychological reasons why people prefer pathos (emotional appeals) and ethos (credibility markers) to logos (logical argument, data, and fact), and it’s probably not going to change.

On the blog You Are Not So Smart, David McRaney describes several ways our intuitions and habits of thought betray us. The Backfire Effect is one such betrayal based on the fact that we usually treat our beliefs like prized property and guard them more carefully than we do our own homes.

Once something is added to your collection of beliefs, you protect it from harm. You do it instinctively and unconsciously when confronted with attitude-inconsistent information. Just as confirmation bias shields you when you actively seek information, the backfire effect defends you when the information seeks you, when it blindsides you. Coming or going, you stick to your beliefs instead of questioning them. When someone tries to correct you, tries to dilute your misconceptions, it backfires and strengthens them instead. Over time, the backfire effect helps make you less skeptical of those things which allow you to continue seeing your beliefs and attitudes as true and proper.—David McRaney

This is why a site like the Washington Post has ended its debunking column: readers absorbed only initial misinformation. Clarifying myths or correcting partial truths only seemed to entrench people’s prior commitment to stories and claims later proven wrong. Facts weren’t working, and misinformation sticks.

Psychologist and writer M. Scott Peck wrote about this in his own way decades ago. In The Road Less Traveled, Peck explains how we set up homeland security not only around single beliefs but also around our larger belief systems:

Our view of reality is like a map with which to negotiate the terrain of life. If the map is true and accurate, we will generally know where we are, and if we have decided where we want to go, we will generally know how to get there. If the map is false and inaccurate, we generally will be lost. While this is obvious, it is something that most people to a greater or lesser degree choose to ignore. They ignore it because our route to reality is not easy. First of all, we are not born with maps; we have to make them, and the making requires effort. The more effort we make to appreciate and perceive reality, the larger and more accurate our maps will be. But many do not want to make this effort. Some stop making it by the end of adolescence. Their maps are small and sketchy, their views of the world narrow and misleading. By the end of middle age most people have given up the effort. They feel certain that their maps are complete and their Weltanschauung is correct (indeed, even sacrosanct), and they are no longer interested in new information. It is as if they are tired. Only a relative and fortunate few continue until the moment of death exploring the mystery of reality, ever enlarging and refining and redefining their understanding of the world and what is true.”
M. Scott Peck

Peck argues that we have to be “dedicated to reality” in order to stay healthy, to make sound decisions, and to make progress that benefits us and others. How we relate to facts makes all the difference: we can be healthy when we’re continuously relating. Establishing a once-for-all-time relation as if the world is a closed, fixed system doesn’t work. And  yet we demonstrate the backfire effect as we resist new facts and undermine the reform that information often requires of us.

People working on issues like climate change are taking this information on board, and rather than simply offering people “the facts” are sharing stories that allow members of the public to engage emotionally, leading with the issues with their values and priorities, not just logically with charts and graphs. LGBTQ organizers are doing likewise.

Why did Britain’s Remain campaign not do that?

How can you engage more than the raw facts when you have opportunities to inform and persuade others in your own career?

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A Writing November

Cartoon of open newspaper with "Correction" advertisement: "The Downing St memo seems to be at odds with pretty much anything you remember seeing and hearing in the media in the runup to the Iraq war. Your memory is in error. We regret your mistake."
(c) Tom Toles (2005) | “The First Draft of the Rewrite of History”

I’ve decided to participate in this year’s National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo 2013), and will be using the 50,000 word-challenge to reboot my research on the British executive branch’s structure, values, personnel, and communications during the 18 months before the UK- and US invaded Iraq.*

This year marked the 10th anniversary of the March 2003 invasion and the 8th year since I began to study how the Blair administration rendered Saddam Hussein’s Iraq “non-compliant” with international protocols on weapons of mass destruction and an “imminent” threat to the UK national interest.

I’ve already written and presented about this case for other communication academics (Popular Culture Association, 2008; Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 2009), and I’ve also written a 150-page doctoral study about it with a bibliography nearly 25 pages long. I may write for these readers again in the future, but not next month.

November is about writing about the British executive branch, weapons of mass destruction, secrecy, freedom of information, and civil servants, not for other academics and not as part of a degree program, but for members of the public: people like you who are savvy and curious, who don’t necessarily know a lot about the details of this case, and who care about good governance and want to read high-quality, engaging content about it.

I’m not going to write and revise next  month, though; I’m just going to write. By the end of the month, I’ll know whether I have it in me to turn this year-old baby into a book in 2014.

My goals for November are simple enough, and I’m declaring them here to increase the risk:

  1. Write ~2,000 words six days each week for 30 days, or a minimum of 1,670 words daily.
  2. Focus on generating these 50,000-50,100 words, rather than fretting about whether they are good words.
  3. Remember how much I love this project and wonder why it’s taken me so long post-graduation to return to it.

If you’d like to track my progress through November, there’ll be a word count widget in the right column of my homepage. And if you have a fiction or non-fiction book in you too, then you still have a day to sign up! As of tonight, nearly 190,000 other writers are waiting for you.

Expect an update on this from me in a few weeks.

* This intention marks me as a NaNo Rebel. Good luck to all the novelists too!