January 27, 2024

Information vacuums and some thoughts about news

I've been thinking a bit about news, and information, and how information flows around and between people. I've been thinking about community informatics and little free libraries and journalism collectives and zines. I've been thinking about disinformation and what it means to be an informed and engaged member of your community. And, due to some recent, ongoing, developing events, a couple thousand words of those thoughts have suddenly come spilling out. I hope you find something interesting here, and if so I would love if you replied with your thoughts. I'd love this to turn into a conversation about where we might go from here.

This is also perhaps a bit of a hint at the direction Future Research is (finally?) going: actual research (original and otherwise), methodologies, and tools, that look at what our collective future(s) could look like— and the paths that might take us there. I'll write a re-introduction post soon.

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In a time where routine occurrences include things like maybe the governor of Texas slowly escalating us into a constitutional crisis, it's striking, and perhaps a bit bad, that mainstream institutions of news are sometimes (increasingly, often) lagging in their coverage of breaking stories. Case in point, the developing situation with Texas and a handful of other states and our southern border⁴.

A bit of auto-ethnography

I first began seeing rumblings about something happening in Texas on the evening of January 24th. I'd just gotten back from a day of beeing mostly out of the loop. Maybe more accurately, I saw a seismic shift in rumblings that have been ongoing since the whole shipping container border wall ordeal over the summer. I've been watching the story of the US southern border, and especially developments in Texas, so it wasn't a sudden appearance of rumblings, but there was a noticeable difference in tone signaling something had happened. Jokes about Biden taking Buc-ees as a strategic maneuver, reminders of the danger of blowing off "something like this" from extremists "who want a civil war 2.0" as mere posturing, and the like.

Those rumblings continued into January 25th. All day I saw posts about a second civil war, Fort Sumter 2.0, chatter about Greg Abbott defying Biden, "the standoff" or "showdown" at Eagle Pass and an oddly pervasive, often unattributed claim and map of 25 states "standing with Texas", through, depending on the messenger, everything from strongly worded statements to actual contingents of national guard troops dispatched to hold the line. Very few of these posts—on Twitter X, Bluesky, Instagram, the wide reaches of the fediverse, the map was truly everywhere—contained links to sources. I hope you'll understand why I didn't immediately consider @NewsWire_US to be an authoritative source.

After a few hours of this buzz, and the typical accompaniment about how "no one is talking about this", I did what I usually do: I checked a few trusted ¹ publications of record. There was nothing about any recent developments in Texas, not from CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Associated Press, or anywhere at all really. I checked a few Texas-specific papers that I'd seen run good coverage of the ongoing border situation, but they also had no recent updates. Then I started keyword searching for additional context on social media and finally found some ... context?

Searching "Texas" on the site formerly known as Twitter turned up links to such reputable outlets as Fox New (among other esteemed right wing propaganda channels), but mostly it was still a soup of unsourced claims and images that "proved" the post (usually headlines with no discernible publication or origin, or vague images supposedly of the border)². Over the course of the day, between meetings, a headline search finally turned up links to a few promising articles. The most reputable being from Newsweek, via the MSN news aggregator, where they had published a pair of stories: Greg Abbott Urged To 'Fully Militarize' Texas State Guard To Counter Biden and Biden Admin Responds to Push to Seize Texas National Guard From Greg Abbott which... alright.

What I mainly saw were reactions to the fact (or idea? since the facts seemed unclear) that something new had happened in Texas. These reactions, among people I trust, ranged from jokes to alarm to reassurance that that it was all PR and bluster and nothing new was really happening as this conflict had been ongoing for a while; across the wider internet, reactions ranged from "let's fucking go #standwithtexas" to "and here's how Putin is behind it". Wall to wall confusion, nervous laughter, reasonable concern, speculation, opinion, while what the situation actually was stayed just out of view, leaving plenty of room for grift and panic.

It wasn't until I was making dinner, after a day of looking and mostly just seeing various reactions to "the situation in Texas", that I finally felt like I had a decent grasp on the situation. I finally found a couple of sources that linked directly to Trump's posts on Truth Social and the official government source for Greg Abbott's border statement. These were decidedly not reputable sources, but they linked directly to facts of the situation: Abbott said this, Trump said that, these specific governors said this.

From those three sources, Greg Abbott's Border Statement³, posts on Truth Social from the official Donald Trump account (post 1, post 2), and a statement from the Republican Governers Association, I was finally able to piece together what had actually happened.

Pulling a point out of the void

This is the crux of what I see as a failure that we repeat far too often: in the interest of deplatforming, of not feeding a beast that thrives on controversy and attention, of being fair and balanced and gathering all the facts, we cede space in the information landscape to voices (or more aptly, sources of noise) that have no such concern. Saying nothing about the verifiable facts of something until you're sure what it means leaves space, a void, an information vacuum that understandably interested people will try to fill. In looking for just the very basic facts against which to check all the chatter, I landed on a number of "sources" that purported to show facts but in reality showed nothing, an unsourced map and some headlines from nowhere, faux analysis, and many, many, many idle words saying a lot of (potentially reckless) nothing.

I also saw the effects of that vacuum across my network: the jokes, reasonable concern, reassurances, speculation. Then alarm and conspiratorial-thinking—"this is it, the big split, here it comes, civil war 2.0, we've been warning about this, the media is complicit, blood on their hands, why is nobody talking about this" and so on.

Now, I have to confess that I don't exactly disagree with some of the alarmist or conspiratorial reactions to what's happening in Texas. It's not great to have a state governor in open defiance of the federal law, and the fact that we have so much anti-federalist sentiment brewing has been a bit of a personal concern for more than a decade now. While I have my own political tendencies that point in directions other than a strong federal government (iykyk), the idea of a civil war is not appealing to me, even less so than the more likely scenario of slowly crumbling into a failed state, two paths that are more made less likely by a state governor defying federal directives and an ex-president/presumptive one-day dictator calling for "all willing States to deploy their guards to Texas" to help in that effort. I can hear the ratcheting as I type this out.

But back to my point: while restraint and caution are more important than ever, and deplatforming absolutely works, it's crucial that we also consider what ground might be ceded when reporting on facts by established, trustworthy parties, is delayed or simply not done at all. I recently read a piece from Jack Crosbie at Discourse, lamenting the loss of outlets for good journalism, and I have to say I agree with the concerns raised about what happens when we lose trustworthy voices with reputations to maintain, whether institutional or individual. I am skeptical of the notion of institutions, but the alternative to institutions is healthy networks to lean on instead, and this, as evidenced by my recent adventure in the information vacuum, is something that we just don't have (at least not at the scale needed) today. I worry constantly about Schelling points in our increasingly desolate information landscape.

This landscape of increasingly empty (or rather, ceded) information space is quite a problem. I'm still trying to understand my own role in filling the vacuum. Increasingly, I find my role to be sketching out the bounds of the problem and highlighting areas where potential solutions might be found (yes, I know, how surprising for a researcher to find that role compelling). Increasingly I think individuals, the actors within networks of other individuals, are a key area of opportunity. As I half-jokingly quipped the other day, "citizen journalism: let's try that again, but this time good".

Filling the vacuum

I'm not ready (nor the right person) to sketch out what a "but this time good" approach to citizen journalism should look like, but I can say that I'm thinking about it and I'd like to talk with others who are exploring similar questions. I can also outline a few things I am doing right now to help fill the information vacuum in small ways:

Vet sources and practice good information hygiene

This is worth a writeup all on its own. In fact, I've been researching this space to see if anything already exists and compile materials should it look like there's something new I can add here.

For now, I'll point you to several sources I've found helpful:

• The Breaking News Consumer's Handbook) — yes it's kinda old, a bit (out)dated, and kinda preachy in that Obama Years Public Radio sort of way, but it's a helpful set of reminders.

• Separating Fact from Fiction on Social Media in Times of Conflict — a solid piece from Bellingcat with good suggestions for navigating our modern information landscape.

• The SIFT Method a chapter on fact checking from a rather well done Creative Commons intro to research textbook.

In truly nerd-tastic auto-ethnographic fashion, I recently started keeping a notebook of sources where I reflect on their reporting and the topics, as a way of auditing my information environment. I only just started this practice, but it seems to be at least interesting.

The tldr here: checking sources, understanding who is saying something and what their motives might be, and sharing tips for sifting signal and fact from noise and grift.

Find, read, and share trusted voices

This isn't just about reposting, this is about actively sharing information into your communities. Tell friends and neighbors about the reporting and stories you follow, share sources. Importantly, do this in conversations wherever they happen, not just on the internet (but don't be insufferable about it! This I think is my main area of focus 😅).

I haven't finished it yet, but I'm finding Let This Radicalize You to have some very good things to say about sharing information in a constructive way that leads people away from despair rather than towards it.

Cultivate networks and ecosystems in which information and co-learning can thrive

Underscoring that I do not have a unified theory or vision for citizen journalism in 2024, I can't entirely articulate how this is different from the thing before it, except to say it feels like a discrete type of work that happens at a different layer.

I wrote a bit about this in Living in the Dying Mall, specifically the section titled Into the forest. The metaphor of an "Information Forest" is appealing to me, with the allusion to food forests, which plays well with another metaphor I love exploring: "community knowledge gardens" — but whatever metaphors we use, we need networks, composed of relationships, along which information can flow.

In practical terms, this has looked like joining a few local Discords and considering more active roles in local groups. It's also been keeping various group chats alive and maintaining a presence on instagram, as that's where many of my people are. I've also been imagining a few shenanigans experiments that focus on community informatics and infrastructure: bulletin boards, little free libraries, utility poles, but I have nothing useful to report.

Other things? probably?

As I said, this is not a grand unified theory or a cohesive vision. I don't have those at the moment and probably never will. But I know this list of things we can do to improve our information ecosystems is incomplete. There are so many people working on this, and if you're one of them (or know someone who is), I'd like to hear about it.

I'm especially interested in OSINT and community research, zines and small press publishing, local community reporting (city council and school board meetings, local labor or transit issues, mayoral business, etc.), volunteer journalism and data collection, press collectives and community spaces of all shapes and sorts.