Reflection 11/30

In my Sociology of Culture class, we learned about the idea of cultural lags — when there is a cultural change but no language to describe it (e.g.: how people were taking selfies but didn’t have a single word for it until “selfie” was invented in 2014, I believe). Reading “The National-Security Case for Fixing Social Media” reminded me of this concept as there seems to be a “policy lag” to counter disinformation. Technology has advanced to a point in which undertaking disinformation campaigns is easy and simple, yet we lack policies to identify and counter disinformation. I would argue we don’t even have enough language to talk about these new disinformation strategies, because (1) most people don’t fully understand their operation, (2) we don’t have unified strategies to approach disinformation, and (3) we as a society are lacking in media literacy. For instance, I was baffled by the term “Syrian Electronic Army” — are our wars now transitioning to the online world?! These digital wars strike me as particularly dangerous, because, unlike “in-person” ones, they work by controlling people’s minds — a type of harm that is much harder to undo than strictly physical harm. I wonder where our discussion of Twitter fiction lies in this analysis of disinformation.