Drones And The Information Landscape

 There have been a lot of breathless social media posts and even real news stories about drones covering America. Almost all of them have turned out to be airplanes. 

One thing I've noticed as a teacher, certainly, is the fallacy that access to information is the same as access to knowledge. I will ask students - who have their laptops open - what is the relative GDP of the United States and Mexico, for instance, and they look at me as if I started speaking Turkish. The idea that you could simply look that up so that the class discussion could continue is foreign to them. Sure, when there's a paper to write, they are all about the Google, but simply looking stuff up?

This relates to discussions we had with our eldest son, who gets a lot of news from TikTok and Instagram and equates that with major news outlets because "they're all biased." This allows for people to get in a lather about drones over the eastern seaboard that are simply the landing lights of planes.

What's worrisome is that we have a lot of "obeying in advance" from the plutocrats who own our major media outlets. Bezos s contributing to Trump's inauguration; the owner of the LA Times is censoring headlines; CNN and the WaPo are run by former Murdoch guys; ABC bent the knee. 

This had my wife in a lather this morning about the end of democracy. Democracy is a spectrum, not a fixed state. Americans living today lived under Jim Crow. Was that "democracy"? Not really. We are definitely headed for a period of imperiled democracy, and while I think federalism and American values of individualism will thwart authoritarianism in the end, I am worried, too, and it's because of how piss poor our information landscape is.

Social media has democratized, not knowledge but information, and that allows for mis- and disinformation to spread. That's how you get people saying they voted for Trump because he will help them with their health care situation.

UPDATE: David Roth nails it. He especially notes how the differing responses from Republicans and Democrats sums up the current state of the two parties.:

You can see, in these representatives’ respective responses to this little flare-up of recreational mental illness, two divergent but not quite competing visions of government. Kim goes out of his way to show that he takes these concerns seriously and allows that there may be something there before promising to do his level best to find out what it is; Van Drew goes on TV and talks the wildest shit he can, and then goes on YouTube, puts on a somber face, says “fear has no place in responsible leadership,” and keeps right on talking it.