Alternative Facts

We need to heed the tenets of information literacy we teach others, including knowing the source of the news we receive and, yes, going so far as to pay for professionally produced and curated information.

Posted on September 1, 2017 in Publisher Editorial

The erosion of privacy is among the more unsettling consequences of the remaking of our society around digital technologies. The fact that we give personal information away voluntarily and for what often seem to be wholly benign purposes is rather beside the point, if in the end the collection of inconsequential bits of personally identifiable information from hundreds of diverse sources yields a detailed description not only of our behavior but of our beliefs, aspirations, and motivations. A recent article in The New York Review of Books details, for instance, how the Trump campaign was able to microtarget thousands of highly granular audiences of like-minded individuals using a suite of commonly available Facebook tools. So much for that free latte you got for “liking” your neighborhood coffee roasters.

Librarians have long been prominent advocates for patron privacy and staunch opponents of governmental efforts to collect information about the reading habits of their patrons. At the same time, they have been as complacent as any other citizen in abetting the “surveillance capitalism” inherent in every digital transaction we engage in. With the political stakes as high as they are now, how can we afford to ignore the consequences of our easy trade-off of privacy for convenience?

An address by Maciej Ceglowski at the Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise conference this past April contains a detailed analysis of how the technological systems we have created have the ability to subvert our democratic institutions. His theses are too complex and numerous to do justice to here, but a few of them are worth noting, if only to remind us that our responsibilities as citizens are not confined to our actions in the public sphere but are implicated in our private behavior as well.

Ceglowski points out that the algorithms we have built on social media to replace information curation are programmed to reward engagement, as expressed in the form of click-throughs, referrals, “likes.” Users who respond to a particular image, ad, or news story are served more of the same. Provocation and controversy, especially, generate responses, which are rewarded with more provocation and controversy, thus driving users toward ever more extreme poles, to which may be directed carefully targeted messaging confirming the biases already revealed there. The message I get is not the message you get. My news is not your news. What is more, I do not even know the news you are consuming, and so over a period of time the body of commonly accepted social information around which we may agree or disagree, an essential requirement of democracy, begins to disappear. Sound familiar?

Among other things, Ceglowski advocates teaching social software to “forget,” to limit the length of time it stores information, thereby allowing us a privacy more like that accorded by the limitations of human memory. But of course there are things we can do before this unlikely day arrives. We can start by placing a higher value on the information we trade for transient economic or social gain, a value at least as high as that assigned it by the recipient. In practical terms, this means becoming far more cautious about our behavior on the web. We need to abandon social media as a news source, recognizing that algorithms have selected the news you (and you alone) will receive. And we need to heed the tenets of information literacy we teach others, including knowing the source of the news we receive and, yes, going so far as to pay for professionally produced and curated information. —MC

About the author:

Mark Cummings is the editor and publisher at Choice

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