Age/Sex/Location?
Back in the early days of the internet you had to work much harder to talk to people and figure out what was going on. Firstly you had the technical hurdles involved in getting onto the internet; using the home phone for hours at a time, dialling up AOL, complicated modems and tricky registration and login, then there was the issue of where to go when you did actually manage to get online. We didn’t have facebook, twitter or even browser technology, if you wanted to talk to someone you had bulletin boards or basic text chat, then later we had chat rooms and ICQ. All of these options were entirely text only and so when engaging with other people, it was always in your best interest to start from a position of complete skepticism. For example, if someone found you on ICQ (an early messaging system, literally ‘I seek you’) and messaged “Hey honey, I’m 18 years old, female and would like to send you 8 million dollars, please give me your bank details” it would be the act of an idiot to assume that any of these pieces of information were correct.
It should be fairly obvious why you would start with a healthy dose of skepticism, but just in case you would have been tempted, the reasons are; a) It seems unlikely that an 18 year old female would be on the internet back in the early days b) How would an 18 year old have access to 8 million dollars, c) Why would that 18 year old choose to give away 8 million dollars d) Whats in it for them in giving that money to me e) Why me anyway?
There are probably another thousand things that should go through your head in this situation, and so you would do the sensible thing and ignore or block the person - in much the same way as we laugh at all those ‘Nigerian Princes’ so desperate to give away their money via email. We use our judgement, we decide that the situation is unlikely, high risk, probably false and entirely dissonant and move on with our lives and laugh at the idea that anyone could be stupid enough to fall for it.
The Ghost
So what happened? As the last couple of weeks have shown, these days people will fall for any old propaganda without any thought at all with the recent ‘Ghost of Kyiv’ stories being the most obvious. If you missed it, there were several tweets about a mysterious Air Ace who was downing Russian jets all over the place, who the locals had dubbed ‘The Ghost of Kyiv’. The internet went wild, social media went into excited spasms and newspapers printed supposed photos and stories about this heroic defender, only for the story to come out 3 days afterward that the news footage of this hero was in-game footage from a popular computer game. By then of course, Twitter had moved on to some other confected excitement or outrage and no one cared much that the prior story had turned out to be complete nonsense. As the saying goes, “A lie goes round the world before the truth gets out of bed”. Even now there are 64 million hits on google for ‘The Ghost of Kyiv’ and photos such as the one below that ‘prove’ he exists, despite this being a photo of someone completely unidentified and with zero context. It could literally be anyone, in any place at almost any time.
A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words
Why do people fall for this blatant nonsense and not use their judgement? I think part of it is our instinct to rely on our senses to determine reality. We are conditioned to use them by thousands of years of evolution and we as humans have not yet caught up with the internet age, photoshopping and deep fakes. Our ancestors wandering the plains of Africa would have seen an animal on the horizon, listened for a tell tale noise, then decided based on the sight, the sound and the gait of the animal what it was likely to be and then would have acted accordingly. Similarly in the modern age we hear a car horn and turn to look at what the noise is and whether we are in danger, we don’t hear a car horn and then immediately jump in a bush without checking.
On the internet we do exactly the same, we hear a thing (or read it) and then if there is a picture to go with it, that seems to be enough to confirm that the written text is correct. Or perhaps we watch a video of someone explaining an event, then see a small clip of part of the event and decide that the entire description of the event must be correct. Then we move on with our lives, adding this ‘truth’ to our worldview. We don’t ever seem to consider that the photo and the text may be entirely unrelated.
All of this reminds me of a story of a friend of mine who still lives in the north of England. Jamie had always been the reliable one of our group of friends, however one night after a particularly long session at the pub (“The Soldiers Arms” in Oldham if you’re asking) he got split up from the rest of us after a silly argument. We didn’t bother looking for him at the time because we were drunk and he was being dramatic. It wasn’t until the next morning that we realised that he hadn’t made it home at all. After some frantic phone calls we eventually found out from his family that he’d been hit by a car and had broken both of his legs, ending up in the local hospital. We felt awful but then worse when he lost his job, his girlfriend and then his shared apartment because of the lasting issues around his injury.
Why is this story relevant? Its relevant because I literally just invented it, I have never had a friend called Jamie, I’ve never been to Oldham and those photos above are just the first things I found when I searched for ‘blokes in pub’ and ‘two broken legs’. They aren’t even remotely related photos. However, it does show how easily you can create a heartwarming story, add a couple of photos for ‘proof’ and that become ‘the truth’. Even now after I’ve told you its a complete invention, part of your brain will store the story away and potentially bring it back as a cautionary tale to be used later in life. The next time a friend of yours wanders off after a drink, you may think of ‘Jamie’ and try extra hard to track down your friend.
Stories are powerful things, and our senses cannot be trusted. The internet and TV have exploited this to make us believe all sorts of nonsense over the last few years and when you add the self reflecting power of social media into the mix these stories gain even more ability to change our reality. Stories used to take generations of repetition to become traditions and cautionary tales, but now a viral story can appear on our timeline 500 times in a single day, be reinforced by TV, radio, and that celebrity we like with the orange hair. Someone you trust posts a story, you read the article and look at the pictures and think that it’s probably true. After all, why would Jeff post something that was a lie? And Eileen and Suzie have already liked it, so it must be true. Then your friend Bob who read the same article tells you about the same story over lunch and this reinforces your opinion that its true because you trust you Bob. By the time you see the story on TV you are utterly convinced it’s true - even though the TV company probably got the story from the same article you read in the first place. One source, three repetitions of the same story and thats it, it’s ‘the truth’ and can never be anything otherwise.
You’ll then shake your head in disbelief at that friend of yours who doesn’t believe it and call him a ‘conspiracy theorist’ making them a distrusted source for any future information. As I discussed in my earlier article (linked below) we are surrounded by information and yet our age old instincts seem to be letting us down. One thing is for sure, if we don’t find a way to navigate this new information age, we are going to find it very difficult to agree what the truth actually is. We need to be much more skeptical of what we believe and we need to exercise our judgement much better or the history books of the future could be very confusing to read.
Thanks for reading
~Z