Valdai Club

But the dangers and risks have grown accordingly and the greatest of them is that a huge number of people incapable of understanding and using information appropriately have been plunged into a state of psychological discomfort, or a kind of cognitive dissonance. And here we observe striking results expressed in the relative degradation of entire popular strata and a kind of social regress in entire regions. A spectacular case in point is the Islamic State (banned in the Russian Federation), which can be represented as a new Middle Age in the modern information age.

Yet another human phenomenon, known as “shared reality,” is that most people are prone to seek backing for their views and judgments and only a few can rebuff public opinion. Like any natural syndrome, this “shared reality” can become a source of horrible misfortunes: mob law, fascism, intolerance, and the like.

In my view, the combination of cognitive dissonance, consumer information technologies and “shared reality” is a new and very dangerous cocktail capable of undermining the very foundations of many modern democratic societies.

Most people can hardly tolerate the growing gap between the level of their own competence and available information capabilities: slowly but surely this leads to their growing alienation from the state.

The result is an identification crisis, specifically political self-identification. It is hard to predict its outcome, but we can see its most different manifestations. The most frequent behavioral pattern is political self-alienation, or negative self-identification with society and the state.

Even more radical behavior is also possible, when a dark and strange reality is not just ignored but rejected or even violently attacked.

Even in the enlightened world, communicative abundance leads to a situation where an increasing share of residents are alienated from politics by virtue of being unable to cope with their growing cognitive dissonance and as a consequence start losing general self-identification. The now-lost, usually traditional civic-political self-identification is replaced by something else. This may happen in comparatively educated and enlightened societies that do not constitute the majority of mankind. But what is happening in comparatively archaic and closed countries?

We see new communicative capabilities used to manipulate others, suppress dissent, or strengthen the most atrocious regimes. Fascism would have been impossible without radio; TV, though heavily censored, functions well in North Korea; a modern monster, ISIS, is leading the world in the use of modern communications, including sophisticated viral advertising.

Much of the world population is wrapped up and manipulated by those who see communications as a tool of the people in charge.

What are ISIS and its progress all about? First, there is a large population of incompetent, confused and bewildered people, and primarily in Islamic countries. It is not accidental, by the way, that ISIS is hostile towards all existing Islamic states – precisely because its audience and potential citizens are primarily in the Islamic world, although there are some elsewhere as well. Second, a free Internet, where any ISIS supporter seeking self-identity in Islam and politics can look for soul-mates and discuss issues of concern. Third, a magic feeling of belonging. Thus, there are all the prerequisites for a community, and later, a world without limits. The current communication environment facilitates the transformation of chimeric communities into a reality.

But even without the ill will of a purpose-oriented manipulator, like in the case of ISIS, or fanatic sects, people, who are left to themselves within their networks, can spontaneously carry out a huge number of silly and low acts, all capable of derailing any task-oriented positive development.

It is extremely important to prevent the online mob from taking power. After all, a crowd and crowd-supported illusion of democracy is a sure way towards totalitarianism and abolition of all freedoms.

Thus, building a rationally governed democratic society in an era of communicative abundance appears to be more difficult than in the past. But it is worth the effort: democracy and freedom are expensive items, ones that are easy to lose and hard to recover.