Most people have heard of the news cycle, but not many know about the information cycle. The two are very different. One is focused on 24-hour windows of time and is arguably driven more by quantity than quality (care to guess which?).
Don’t mistake me, I’m not implying that the news-cycle is useless. In fact, it’s actually a component of the information cycle, and it’s this bigger picture, higher level information ecosystem that helps us filter the high quality and (hopefully) more truthful information from the vast quantities of information the news cycle and it’s attendant social technologies produce.
This third episode of the TimTalksPolitics podcast introduces the theory of the information cycle and wraps up the opening triptych of high level concepts that I introduce in Episode 1 and Episode 2. Taken together, these first three episodes are designed to be the introduction to the content that follows for however long I do this podcast. So whether you started listening from the beginning or are coming to the show at a later date, I hope you listen to this opening movement as I believe it will help you understand the larger project of TimTalksPolitics.com.
The transcript below is edited for clarity.
Main Topic: Politics and the Information Cycle
We defined politics in the previous episode as being a series of negotiated relationships.
Critical to those relationships is information, which is why an independent and diverse media is so crucial to the health of democratic system.
However, the Internet has broken down a lot of barriers and filters, and now we’re all members of the media. So we need to discuss how we, as citizens, engage in information and how that informs our politics.
One of the big stories of the 2016 election was the role of misinformation and its effect on the outcome. So today, i want to talk about how to find good information and how to use it in your political discussions, then I’ll supply you with a few resources.
Know the information cycle. Not the news cycle, which is far too short to know anything, but the information cycle, which is made up of about five categories of information:
- TV, Internet, Social Media
- Newspapers
- Magazines
- Journals
- Books, government reports, reference materials
The more complex, advanced works like books and reference materials provide verified data, perspective, and depth, whereas the simpler works provide immediacy and basic facts.
An excellent example of how this information cycle plays out is with the Mueller Report (a government report) that took over two years to produce from the time initial allegations of wrongdoing on the part of the then Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia
NOTE: I go into more detail in the audio as to how the Mueller Report follows the information cycle.
So, how you can apply the information cycle to assess your own knowledge and understanding of a subject?
First: Go back to the source
This is particularly true in the days of social media and President Trump. One of the biggest areas of friction between the president and the press is that the press is focused on facts, but Trump’s stream of consciousness rhetoric doesn’t lend itself to easy interpretation. If you think, he’s the only one guilty, go check your text messages. For every freakout over “what Trump said,” I usually find, when I go back to the initial quote, that what I’m hearing freakout over is on a vague quote that has multiple interpretations.
Second: Listen to both sides
This doesn’t mean that you must always listen to or read one conservative source and one liberal source. However, you want to develop a posture of hearing the points of both sides. For me, I watch publications across the political spectrum and I try to read links my friends share that disagrees with my assumptions. I try to put myself in a position to be proven wrong because that’s how I refine my thinking, while deepening my understanding.
Third: Let a story “breathe”
It takes time to know all the particulars of a subject, and even after a year, dynamic developments can continue to add facts that take on a life of their own – a mini cycle within the larger information cycle. Giving a story time to develop also helps us develop perspective and self-control. This is a big part of why I don’t react to major events on social media very quickly, I usually wait a few days before I say anything, if I ever do. Benefit, here, is the language of different information sources start to influence our own, so consuming information across the spectrum gives us a deeper well of resources to draw one when discussing things. This particularly important in an age when hyperbole and something I call “the Rhetoric of Certainty” dominates the Internet.
Conversation starters: What does your information cycle look like?
Of the five information categories defined in the information cycle, which ones predominate your information consumption? Why do you think that is?
The information cycle model is fairly new, so I’m not going to suggest that there is an ideal quantity for each category, but we can apply the basic (and very Aristotelian) principle of “too much of a good thing is a bad thing.” So generally speaking, is your information diet unbalanced? Is it unbalanced in terms of how much you consume in particular categories, or in terms of the quality and sources of information? It could be one or the other or it could be both.
The spoken and written word (podcasts and reading)
The University of Illinois provides a really helpful infographic on the information cycle.
After the Parkland school shooting, I took my own advice and gave the story over a week to “breathe,” as I listened to and observed both sides of the vociferous gun debate. From that I noticed that the hyper fast news + social media cycle seemed to be driving a “rhetoric of certainty” despite the changing nature of the developing story.
Developing my newsletter the Weekly Brief was a big part of my response to this rising rhetoric of certainty. You can read the brief I wrote outlining the need for such a newsletter, and subscribe to the Weekly Brief as well.
The last word
C.H. Spurgeon, 1859
“A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on.”