The Debate | Opinion | Oceania

Breaking Through Infoglut: Australia’s Anger-information Overload Cycle

COVID, global warming, conspiracy theorists, natural disasters, financial collapses – and a sham social media ban. It’s no wonder young Australians are glum.

Why are we so angry? The easy, lazy, and entirely wrong explanation is that our technologies are to blame: the internet, smartphones, social media, artificial intelligence, and so on. 

That’s the argument behind Australia’s doomed social media ban for young people, which is inspired by the deceptive claims and cherry-picked statistics peddled by pop-psychology influencers like Jonathan Haidt in his roundly debunked book “The Anxious Generation,” and driven by a moral panic that was cynically manufactured by the Murdoch media.

So why are we so anxious, and angry? Take the average 20-year-old in Australia: born into the aftermath of the 2008 Great Financial Crisis, they have seen companies reap record profits while for ordinary Australians the prospect of affordable housing has slipped ever further from their grasp. 

They grew up in the shadows of the unresolved conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and today encounter a daily dose of death and destruction in the reporting from Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, and other conflict hotspots. They spent their most formative teenage years in COVID lockdowns and Zoom schooling, while conspiracy theorists tried to convince their parents that the pandemic was a hoax perpetuated by some global cabal. 

They’ve experienced more than a decade of the hottest years in human memory during their lifetime, most likely lived through one or more natural disasters in their area and yet have seen utter political inaction on the climate crisis. And those of us who are older have simply experienced all that for longer.

So how could they, and we, not be anxious and angry – regardless of whether we use smartphones and social media, or not? As David Weinberger wrote as early as 2004, in his fabulous take-down of the “echo chamber” fallacy, “the problem with an extraterrestrial-conspiracy mailing list isn’t that it’s an echo chamber,” facilitated by the digital platforms of the day: rather, the problem is “that it thinks there’s a conspiracy by extraterrestrials.”

The same goes for climate crisis denialists, anti-vaccination activists, sovereign citizens, far-right extremists, and other anti-social, anti-societal, and anti-democratic groups: it’s their angry, extreme, exclusionary, and uncompromising views that are the problem, rather than the technologies they use to express and spread them; if they didn’t have X as a platform that actively endorses their views, they’d find another.

Wherever that anxiety and anger comes from, whether “the internet” (whatever that means these days) or the other threatening scenarios: together they have highlighted the complex world we live in.  

Conspiracy as Comfort

Let’s take one example: the observation that pandemics like COVID-19 simply happen from time to time and that there’s little more we can do than simply to prepare for the next one, is entirely correct, of course, but also deeply unsatisfying. It’s a great deal more convenient to comfort ourselves with fairytales of bioweapon factories, lab leaks, depopulation agendas, or interference by the Illuminati, aliens, or the Antichrist: they provide a concrete target for our anxiety, anger and action.

Where our modern communication technologies do come in is in the fact that they’ve made all that information – “real” as much as “fake” – so much easier to access and circulate, globally and instantly. 

This substantially contributes to an information overload: we can readily access WHO reports about the pandemic and its causes, the more or less careful and insightful coverage of those reports by the world’s media, but also the “explainer” writings and videos of conspiracy theorists and influencers that cherry-pick and misrepresent those facts in order to perpetuate their “alternative” worldviews.

We’re........

© The Diplomat