Pity the fool

There are some films you see as a child that stick with you for the rest of your life. Something in them alters how you see the world, how you frame your own existence. For me, one of those movies was “Wag the Dog”.

The film, made in 1997, is about a spin-doctor who manages to convince the entire voting public of America that their country is at war in order to cover up a presidential scandal. He hires a Hollywood producer, and together they convince the mass media that there is a war happening in Albania that only their beloved president - up for re-election in a few weeks - can bring to a peaceful, heroic end.

The tagline for the movie is: “A Hollywood producer. A Washington spin-doctor. When they get together, they can make you believe anything.” And in the story, they did. The world bought it. In fact, their ruse was so convincing that eventually it spun completely out of their control.

“Wag the Dog”was a wake-up call for me, because I realised that at the time the movie tagline was very true. If the mass media was convinced of something, so were the rest of us. It's how the great propaganda machines of the world work. At least it was.

The reality is, “Wag the Dog”could not happen now. Back in 1997, there was no Google, no YouTube, certainly no Twitter. We were all subject to the stories the mass media spun, we were grateful for the scraps of news we would get of events unfolding in far distant lands. Now, often, we find out about it before they do, or at the very least, as they do. Look at the Arab Spring uprisings - the darling of the social media case studies, or the other favourite, Sohaib Athar, who inadvertently live-tweeted the operation that took down Osama bin Laden. Closer to home, there's the example of the recent Lonmin strikes - Twitter had the photos and footage of the miners getting shot long before we heard it from “official” sources.

The Internet is, in short, amazing. Our global village spreads news fast, sometimes literally at the speed of light (in places that have fibre-optic cables, that is), and it's nearly impossible to keep anything hidden nowadays, isn't it? A Hollywood producer and a Washington spin-doctor could try to make us believe a war was happening that wasn't, but we now have the ability to double-check. We'd question them, wouldn't we?

We have the access to this amazing technology, to this fountain of information, but we don't use it.

Tallulah Habib, social media activist, ITWeb

Here's the thing. We have the access to this amazing technology, to this fountain of information, but we don't use it. Not nearly as often as you'd think we would.

Researcher and science writer Martin Robbins, in an article in the 'Newstatesman' earlier this year, about the Shell/Greenpeace debacle, said something I now have written in bold letters above my desk: “Evolution has not yet gifted us social apes with sceptical powers to match our fascination with 'like' buttons.”

He was speaking specifically about our gut reaction to hit “share” as soon as we see something vaguely interesting on our social networks, and how even journalists are guilty of this, a point that has been proven a few times since I read that article. Just the other day a well-known local news editor tweeted that Fidel Castro had died, which turned out to be quite obviously a hoax, as the account cited had been created two days previously and had a grand total of eight followers. Even though Robbins' gripe was with social media in particular, it's astounding how seldom we check the claims we read about online.

There's an old SEO (search engine optimisation) joke that goes: “Where's the best place to hide a body?” The answer is: “On the second page of Google search results.”

The point is that nobody ever does in-depth research. Our opinions may not be formed by the nine o'clock news any more, but are we any less critical for it? Do we ever research beyond what Wikipedia and the first few Twitter results tell us? And even if someone does, what power does one small voice have?

I hate to say it, but I think “Wag the Dog” could very well be remade for our modern world. Except instead of a Hollywood producer, the spin doctor would hire a social media guru and an SEO specialist.