An event happens in a third-world nation and the international media starts buzzing with opinions and analyses regarding the repercussions, diplomatic affinities, and future alliances. On the other hand, even if a major mishap occurs in a first-world nation, the story is tailored in a way as to attract the least attention and minimal negative publicity. Media, riding on the technology train, helps create opinion at home and in the world. It grows beyond the information to influence the behaviour and attitude of larger audiences.
It is no wonder then that major media organizations have come to be wholly or partly owned or orchestrated by States. The power to disseminate, hold and withdraw information plays a key role in determining and shaping the opinion of millions today. While textual content by itself has the power to cause irreparable damage, textual content paired with audio-visual component can double down on the false ideologies and narratives, which get cemented over time to build a mass following later.
Media And The Game of Perception Management: History
Media was designed for the dissemination of information from one to hundreds and from hundreds to millions. The first deception of perception can be dated back to the Greeks, where false information was created and spread to win wars or sway the opinion of individuals. Even during the era of Mongol invasions, the invaders were projected in horrifying pictures and narratives propagated by agents, who would spread the news of terror before the invading hordes arrived at the gates of cities. False stories concocted by tradesmen with regard to the military might of the Mongols birthed inexplicable fear in the minds of the locals, leading them to surrender rather than face the Mongol armies in battle.
This pattern continued through the two World Wars, as diplomacy gained further prominence and the world heralded the age of machines and messages relayed in secret codes. When technology paired hands with the dissemination of information, the ones controlling such dissemination further customized the information to suit their own beliefs and agendas.
Objective Truth and Media
Our rejection of the objective truth and the literary awakening of a culture of opinions has further strengthened the game of perception management. Print in the hands of the Editor and Radio & Television in the hands of talk show hosts… the same symphony of stretching the truth and moulding it in a way so that the larger demography gets swayed and believes in their words and falls for their antics is played out day in and day out. The vast range of inconclusive discussions leaves the audience in a state of frenzy, where the objective truth is repeatedly muddied in the name of opinions. The end result is a disinterested audience, merely receiving part-time entertainment, courtesy the false narrative.
Further, the bombardment of similar narratives through social media channels, ads and even humour reinforces such concocted narratives in the minds of the audience. The dominance and cult status of a handful of individuals who run the show is the final nail in the coffin of independent public opinion.
“The action take place later; the narrative is set before.”
State – Media – Public Opinion
While the idea of freedom is loosely based on the information disseminated through media channels, in the hands of imperious governments, it can become a tool to manipulate a collective change in the psyche of people and drive agendas and narratives as per their needs and desires. After all, what nation does not seek to retain substantial control over its image on the international stage, ostensibly in the interest of harnessing “soft-power”. The intelligence agencies, too, become a mere pawn of the State propaganda in this entire game. Journalists and media organizations in turn act as ‘sleeper-cells’ for these agencies, as and when required, to amplify the propaganda for the larger public. The projection of such narratives not only helps to safeguard the State’s interests, but also to motivate or de-motivate people at home and on foreign soil as per their needs and demands.
The Game of Perception
From Cambridge Analytica to Covid 19, the world media has played a huge role in maintaining the narrative on these issues, as fed to them by the ones setting the information.
The Soft Power 30 Rankings are given by an independent organization in the US that partners with Facebook to devise these rankings. These rankings are based on perception of the country’s Enterprise, Culture, Digital Infrastructure, Government, Engagement and Education. Interestingly, none of the third world countries have ever made it to the top 30 rankings in this list. This perception management by the media in most first-world countries is further borne out from the fact that the world has largely remained oblivious to the fact that a WWF study criticized Sweden for its unsustainable consumption of the planet’s resources and even went on to say that if everyone on Earth started living the Swede lifestyle, we would require 4.2 Earths.
This game of perception is played with a double-edged sword, where building one’s own image and destroying others’ has become the sole purpose of media.
Information Agents
The movement has now started to seep into the world of social media, which solely catered to fashion and entertainment earlier, has now become a core junction for politics and diplomacy. The rise of a bunch of young individuals popularly known as social media “influencers”, who identify themselves as “nationalists”, and whose mere aim is to spew propaganda in the name of politics and news via jazzy photos and videos with high production quality is a troubling example of this phenomena. Lifestyle, Dating and even Entertainment apps have become the new ‘Information Agents’, hired by the State and Intelligence agencies to further reinforce their agenda by exploiting the data collected on the users.
All these hordes of free gaming, dating and content apps that customize everything for us and essentially seek anything from location data to our email id and more, act as agents, which as and when required could be used to led to us and our privacy.
Conclusion
Media, shaped by the political, economic and social factors, as well as by the ideologies of the person who produces or owns the media, seldom fails to convey the objective truth. For the sake of commercial success and fulfilment of propaganda, a distorted image twice removed from reality is fed. One simple example of the this can be seen in the reportage of an event by different newspapers, who tailor their content to be suitable for their target audience.
For the State, the objective is to fortify their ‘information agents’ and their ‘media’ in order to create stronger voices and personalities that make half-baked truths and distorted realities believable. The prevalence of these tactics in the first-world countries only encourages the third-world States to also extend their perception influence through better ‘marketing’, stronger ‘resources’ and the much-needed shift from being caught up in trivial religious and border-disputes towards building their own information warfare channels in the media. “For a thing doesn’t necessarily need to be gold to be sold, all you need to do is make it look like one.”
In the end, as far as the larger public is concerned, the never-ending loop of who and what to believe and what not to, shall be the death of our consciousness and inquisitiveness, unless we stop believing everything our screens throws at us.
