More Information Can Lead to Greater Uncertainty – not just in Syria!
In a public lecture at CEU’s School of Public Policy on February 16, Lisa Wedeen explored how the proliferation of information sources and acceleration in the circulation of news has contributed to greater uncertainty, rather than relieving it. During her presentation, Wedeen, who is the Mary R. Morton Professor of Political Science and the College and the Co-Director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory at the University of Chicago, focused primarily on Syria, a country that she knows well and has written about extensively.
She noted that the volume of information and the “high-speed eventfulness” that is created when information is circulated through digital media produces an “atmospherics of doubt.” “The multiplication of distribution sites, the ease with which digital photos can be doctored, the speed with which ‘news’ gets circulated and then displaced, and the competition between rival discourses registering moral outrage have led to new (or at least novel-seeming) forms of uncertainty,” which she discussed by “unpacking” two events in Syria. In spring 2011, Ibrahim Qashoush became famous for his inspiring anti-Asad songs. He enjoyed enormous popularity and his songs became a rallying cry for opposition groups. When he was found dead with his larynx cut out on July 4, 2011, the assumption was that the Asad regime or its supporters had killed him. As people learned more, however, their uncertainty increased – about who Qashoush was (was he actually the singer? was he a police informant?) and whether the victim was even Qashoush (who was purportedly photographed two years after he had been “killed”).
The second example Wedeen gave was the Ghouta chemical attack in August 2013. Within days of the attack, US Secretary of State John Kerry claimed that he had “undeniable evidence” that the Asad regime was responsible. The US government, however, never provided this proof. Instead, other “evidence” emerged that led to more questions being raised about who was responsible for the attack. “The more information emerged, the more uncertainty there was that it was the Syrian regime that was responsible,” observed Wedeen.
Wedeen explained that the Asad regime by, for example, keeping journalists out of the country, “helped to produce the conditions of uncertainty – and capitalized on them.” The burden was on the opposition to generate information that would reduce uncertainty, which proved enormously difficult for them to do as the regime continued to generate its own “evidence.” Even though the regime’s sometimes “outlandish” stories, such as when it claimed that the victims of the Ghouta attack were actually supporters of the Asad regime and had been transported to Ghouta in buses immediately prior to the attack, persuaded no one, these stories did succeed in increasing uncertainty. “You don’t have to be believable to be powerful,” said Wedeen.
“A surplus of information may actually generate the very uncertainty that putting it into circulation seeks to allay,” explained Wedeen. “Information overload and the potential for uncertainty it generates,” moreover, “may induce people to seek out opinions reaffirming their own. This tendency towards balkanization can lead to polarization,” said Wedeen, noting that this was something that many scholars of US politics have noted. She emphasized how this “gravitation towards a comfort zone” creates “siloed publics,” where “debates take place within narrow communities of argument that allow interlocutors to take pleasure in encountering views that confirm their own.” Most suggestively, she argued that these conditions of uncertainty provide “some with an alibi to avoid committing to judgment at all.”
Wedeen wove her empirical observations into accounts of language and judgment put forth by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Hannah Arendt, concluding her talk with accounts of Syrian artists whose current work “unsettles the conventions of documentary representation” and suggests ways to “bypass” current “impasses.”