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Imagine a Friday night in 1984 when two politically minded folks chat over beers at a local tavern. They are arguing over how Indiana voted in the 1884 presidential election. One insists the Hoosier state voted Republican, and the other insists it voted Democrat. Unless the tavern happened to have an almanac on the premises, the two barflies would have to wait until the morning to resolve the dispute.
Fast forward to 2024. The two could resolve the dispute in seconds via a simple online cellphone search. They would find that, in 1884, Indiana’s 15 electoral votes went to the Democrat, Grover Cleveland, who defeated James G. Blaine 219-182 in the Electoral College. Cleveland’s vice president was former Indiana Gov. Thomas Hendricks.
Today, people can instantly verify this and many other facts about the 1884 election. The cost of accurate and verifiable information has declined dramatically in the internet age.
It was the 1990s when most of us old guys got connected to what was then called the “information superhighway.” Many of us hoped its broad reach and rapid transmission of information would reinforce truth, restrain falsehood, and lead to better individual and collective decision-making.
While it seems axiomatic that more information is better than less, we don’t observe extensive agreement about what information is accurate or significant improvements in personal and collective decision-making. More information is more challenging to sort, process and evaluate.
More to the point, most political controversies are not about facts but rather about competing narratives that can never be resolved by facts alone. While resolving facts might be much easier today, discerning between narratives is likely more difficult. It is easy to choose one’s facts to fit one’s narrative. It is easy to use social media to retreat into an echo chamber of online friends who share a common narrative.
Online service providers can and do promote or suppress certain narratives in the interests (or guise) of community standards, dispelling misinformation, or simply promoting a preferred partisan/ideological agenda. One woman’s reasonable moderation of content on social media is another woman’s ideological straitjacket. One man’s suppression of hateful speech is another man’s censorship. One person’s minority view is another person’s disinformation.
It has always been naïve for optimists to think technological improvement can somehow redeem and reform human nature. We see no way out of this dilemma and hope information networks evolve for the better. At least, we can always hope.•
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Bohanon and Horowitz are professors of economics at Ball State University. Send comments to ibjedit@ibj.com.
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