By Christopher Burns
In a recent speech to magazine executives, Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, called the internet a "cesspool" of false knowledge. His point was that editorial brands are the critical value component in an age when the world is flooded with information that may or may not be true. It is the authority of the magazine, newspaper, broadcaster, blogger that we trust, not the facts they present.
Lawyers have known for years that if they have to choose between a witness who knows all the facts and someone who seems believable, go with believable. People are rarely able to judge whether new information is true. Unless they can confirm it themselves, how would they know? Even when they compare it to the rest of the information available, it is all coming from the same source.
Thirty years of information disasters have shown that warnings from "experts" are often ignored in favor of advice from "friends". Nuclear energy experts warned about Three Mile Island, NASA safety engineers warned about the Shuttle Challenger, banking experts warned Congress about the ticking time bomb of sub-prime mortgages, but no one listened because the language was technical, the warners were odd, their faces were unfamiliar.
George Lakoff, professor of cognitive linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, says that the Obama campaign ran on values, trust, authenticity and identity. Not on the issues. Lakoff says that when we watch someone who has values and an attitude we admire, our mirror neurons fire and we experience being that person. We feel good, and we pay less attention to a rational evaluation of the case being made. The media know this. For years, television consultants in the United States advised news programs on how to make the newscaster "attractive" to the audience, and stations that paid attention to style were more successful than those who worried only about the quality of the news.
You can do the same. Now you can buy software to make sure that your email message projects an attractive, trustworthy, authoritative persona. Or not. Jon Oberlander, Professor of Epistemics (whatever that is) at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, has prototyped a style checker you can use to adjust three aspects of your language—tough minded, extrovert and emotional—from low to high. Extroverts say hi, but introverts say hello. People in charge say things like "catch up" and "take care". They say what they "want", what they "need" and what they are "able" to do, while wusses say they are "trying" to get something done, or they are "working on it." Don't laugh. Whether you are running for President or trying to push your project through the bureaucratic sausage grinder, it is human nature to believe a person more than a fact.
Schmidt's point was that the internet is data that is not yet information, information that is not yet knowledge. It takes an editor to establish a reputation for balance, detail, truth, and insight. It takes an information "brand" like Huffington, Drudge, Talking Points Memo, or Fox (choose your filter) to organize the news around a set of concepts and values you can understand and predict, even if you don't share them. It takes a personality the reader can come to trust.
(Originally published at GoArticles and reprinted with permission from the author, Christopher Burns).
Christopher Burns is one of the country’s leading experts on information management in organizations, and the author of Deadly Decisions: How False Knowledge Sank the Titanic, Blew up the Shuttle, and Led America into War. For more information, please visit: Deadly Decisions.
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