Information and Perception: Living Through a Revolution
We live, in the
Information Age, or so it is said. According to the pyramidal diagram
constructed by the eminent geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, information is the second of
four levels of understanding. It renders the base of the pyramid, facts and
observations, more powerful by combining them in such a way as to add value,
but it lacks the insight and explanatory power of the higher levels, knowledge
or wisdom. Hence, information is not wisdom: it constitutes the bricks from
which we can, if we want to, build the wall of knowledge, from which, we might,
if we are lucky, accede to the lofty heights of wisdom.
Professor Henry Quarantelli,
the doyen of disaster sociologists, wrote that the current information and
communications technology revolution is about as important for humanity as the
invention of printing was in the fifteenth century. He noted its enormous power
to transform the way we view the world and hence the way we react to disasters.
However, he also listed a dozen unintended consequences that will need to be
dealt with, and that may create problems rather than solve them.
We also live in an
unstable age, one characterised by vast and profound changes. Many of their
most important implications are currently unpredictable and are likely to
remain so for a long time. We have glimpsed enormous potential, but do we know
how to harness it? The copiousness and unprecedented ease of access that
characterise modern information resources pose severe challenges. The first is
how to appreciate and utilise such a huge amount of information. How to
separate useful from useless information is a pressing problem. So is how to
verify the truthfulness of information and interpret its meaning.
The greatest risk is
posed by the fact that, when confronted by avalanches of facts and data, the
easy way out is to treat them superficially. The bombardment of new information
is a sort of solar wind that blows constantly through cyberspace and the mass
media. In reaction, the world's attention span is limited and fickle, It passes
rapidly from one novel incident to the next. As a result, we have developed an
attitude to disasters that brings to mind the ice-cream parlour, home of the
'flavour of the month'. Today as I write, the flavour is 'earthquakes', as two
very damaging ones have just occurred in northwest Iran. Perhaps next month it
will be floods, or terrorism, or nuclear radiation releases. It all depends
upon what happens in the meantime.
Long ago, risk
researchers determined that people find it difficult to evaluate risks
concurrently, and hence, despite the fact that we all run multiple risks all of
the time, we tend to think about them sequentially, one or two at a time.
Clearly, in the 'flavour of the month' approach, this is also true of the
collective psyche of the mass of viewers, listeners, readers and surfers, the
consumers of news (which we all are).
The survivors of the
information age are those of us who know how to adapt to it. This not only
means adapting the way we seek and assimilate information; something that is
now radically different from how we did it half a century ago. It also means
learning how to exploit the sources and flows of information and how to
commandeer and dominate the interpretations. Verily, the soothsayers have not
gone away. They no longer look at the tails of comets and tell us that the gods
are angry, but there is no guarantee that a pundit with a strong presence on
the dominant mass media will offer anything better, for we live in an age in
which the public has developed a chronic appetite for personalities.
Incidentally, the original pundits carried the equipment when the British
surveyed north India. No doubt it was a repetitive job, because modern punditry
certainly is.
One well-known pundit
of the modern media was a certain Dr Iben Browning. His chosen field was one of
the most contentious in science: the short-term prediction of earthquakes for
the purposes of warning people of their imminent arrival. In 1990 he
"predicted" (if that is the right word—which it probably isn't) an
earthquake in southern Illinois. Modern media do not distinguish well between
'plausible' and 'specious'. Browning is now deceased: he took his earthquake
prediction secrets to the grave with him. However, in 1990 he developed a
strong and plausible mass media presence that put the official scientists to
shame.
No earthquake
occurred in southern Illinois during the period specified by Browning, but
anxiety proliferated among the local population and there was a significant
convergence reaction among the US mass media.
Short-term earthquake
prediction may never be feasible. Although there are nine or ten physical
phenomena that can undergo characteristic, or 'signature' changes hours or days
before earthquakes, the level of uniqueness in slip-faulting mechanisms
militates against developing a standardised short-term prediction measure that
can be employed with ease around the world. And, incidentally, contrary to
public perception, the anomalous behaviour of animals is about the least
reliable earthquake precursor, such are the unknown vagaries of the psychology
and reflexes of animals large and small. Nonetheless, all physical precursors
are being actively, indeed intensively, studied by scientists in the hope that
one day there will be a break-through.
The US Geological
Survey, as custodian of America's scientific values in this field, examined its
navel after the Browning affair and concluded that it had underestimated the
power of charlatans to manipulate the media and appear credible. A publicity
offensive should have been mounted on behalf of official science. Incidentally,
Browning's coup de theatre was the fact that he managed to convince a
legitimate geologist that his prediction had substance. The man in question was
eventually sacked by his university for misconduct.
Two years later, in
1993, the US Geological Survey issued a prediction for a moderately powerful
earthquake on a locked segment of the San Andreas fault in California. By
virtue of having a surface expression, the San Andreas enjoys a public image
that few other active faults can aspire to (most of them are deeply buried).
The role of cowboy films and Easy Rider can perhaps be detected in the fact
that equally spectacular surface faults in China and Venezuela remain unknown
to the world's media audiences.
Parkfield,
California, lies astride the locked segment of the fault. In 1993 it had a
population of 57, plus 300 scientific instruments, 80 of which were
continuously recording. Within days of the start of the USGS's 'Parkfield
Earthquake Experiment', the local population had swollen to over 2,000, a
motley combination of media representatives, New Agers and the curious and
idle. But after 18 months the experiment ended without a significant seismic
event—and even today it still hasn't occurred.
Official reports by
the US Geological Survey make it clear that a 90 per cent probability of a
magnitude six earthquake also means a perfectly respectable ten per cent
probability of nothing at all. And that is what transpired. It reminds me that
I once attended an earthquake conference at which the flower of Californian
seismologists congregated in a flimsy looking room that projected outwards from
the first floor of a monastery (a 1930s edifice, not something Mediaeval—this
was California), about ten kilometres from the San Andreas fault. It was
interesting, if somewhat macabre, to speculate what would have happened if the
'big one' had occurred while we were all in that room, but such thoughts took
no account of the hard reality of probabilities. And if probabilities did not
enter into my considerations, they are positively shunned by the general
public.
It is an interesting
exercise to type 'earthquake prediction' into an Internet search engine. Bona
fide, official science has its websites, and these explain that long-term,
regional earthquake prediction is effectively a solved problem with routine
procedures, but short-term transient prediction is no more than an elusive
goal. What is worrying, however, is that there are many other websites that
confidently predict major earthquakes all over the place, and usually the day
after tomorrow. Hence, the Internet has given free rein to the charlatans.
Although the science behind their activities is false or suspect, the visual
impact of their sites is usually as good as that of the USGS. And because it is
the Internet the sites are not policed.
Many a legitimate
scientist would like to be the one who is remembered for ever after as being
the person who cracked the problem of how to predict an earthquake reliably in
the short term. The fact that earthquakes do commonly emit precursors makes
this goal seem tantalisingly near at hand. Fortunately, bona fide science has
its in-built protection mechanisms which ensure that legitimate scientists do
not make unjustifiable leaps of faith, and that charlatans are excluded from
the circle of practitioners. But does the public realise this? The
socio-economic implications of earthquake prediction are potentially enormous:
house prices may dip, people may not go to work, children may be kept away from
school, residents may leave the area, psychological pathologies may develop,
and so on. In other words, the stakes are high in both the negative and the
positive senses, for being able to predict imminent earthquakes could indeed
save lives if it were coupled with a well-rehearsed plan of action.
In 2004 a talented
Israeli sociologist, Avi Kirschenbaum, published a book about disasters. The
body of his text reported a well-executed but fairly standard social survey of
how the Israeli population reacts to threats, hazards and emergencies—a kosher
piece of work. However, there was something radically different about his first
and last chapters. In Chapter 1, Kirschenbaum plotted the number of disasters,
worldwide, against the dates on which important disaster management
organisations were founded. He discovered a significant correlation. Now, most
researchers would automatically assume that the organisations, associations and
agencies were founded in response to the disasters. In individual cases, that
is often so. However, Kirschenbaum thought the opposite. He argued that there
are increasing numbers of disasters because there are increasing numbers
of disaster management agencies, not the other way around. His thesis was that
these organisations have a vested interest in self aggrandizement and therefore
tend to inflate the number of disasters and the magnitude of their impacts. In
reality, he wrote, the increases in the size and frequency of disasters have
been relatively modest.
Kirschenbaum's last
chapter contained a radical proposition. Having argued that the world can ill
afford such rampant inflation in the number of disaster management agencies, he
suggested that the best thing to do would be to make disaster response a
fee-for-service activity. If a person, or a family, does not subscribe to it,
they will receive no help when the next disaster occurs. Since Kirschenbaum was
writing in the early 1990s privatisation has become more and more fashionable
and has been applied with careless abandon to many public services in many
countries. Why not civil protection? Parts of it are already in private hands
anyway, for example in branches of many countries' health services.
In my view there are
too many considerations about welfare and the care of the vulnerable for such
an approach to be morally justifiable. I will return to this issue in my next
talk. But for the time being I would like to point out that Kirschenbaum's book
should be required reading. It is a sort of "intellectual cod liver oil"
for disaster specialists: it tastes bad but it does you good.
Is 'virtual reality'
an oxymoron? And in any case, what is reality? An enduring image comes to my
mind. It shows a village ruined by earthquake. All the houses are visibly
damaged, and some have collapsed. They have been abandoned by their occupants,
with one exception. This is the coffee bar at the centre of town, which has
reopened with temporary connections to electricity and water supplies. Inside
it there is a party of local residents who are grouped around a television
screen. They are watching an image of a town that has been ruined by earthquake
and abandoned by its inhabitants, except for one building at its centre.
Possibly it is their own town.
This early and rather
primitive example of a sort of virtual reality highlights the importance of
perception of hazards, risks and disasters. Although perception studies have
been conducted in this field for the past seventy or eighty years, they have
only really come into their own since the 1970s. In part, this is an effect of
the development in the 1970s of the concept of subjective risk (as opposed to
measurable 'objective risk' based on hard data about probabilities). In the
end, perception equals money, because it can be equated with what people are
prepared to pay for safety and what services they are not prepared to
underwrite because they perceive them as being unacceptably risky.
Disaster risk is a
parallel world to the one we live in. I will go further: risk does not exist. I
hasten to add that despite that it is no less real. But risk is like friction,
it only comes into play when it is mobilised. We can never make a direct
measurement of risk: what we measure in its stead is impact, and by then the
risk is over and done with.
Under these
circumstances it is not surprising that risk has proved such an elusive
phenomenon, easily misunderstood, seldom perceived accurately (if accuracy is
possible) and in many cases feared and dreaded.
Our parallel world is
not merely inhabited by risk, it is increasingly subject to risk aversion. A
risk is regarded as 'dreaded' if it is considered intolerable. What is
tolerable is a matter treated with great elasticity. I mentioned in a previous
talk that the glare of publicity can turn on the flow of solidarity; and
turning off the stream of reporting can stifle the process of donation.
Likewise, the degree to which a risk is feared or dreaded—conversely, the
extent to which it is accepted—depends at least in some measure on publicity.
In the mid-1960s in a
classic article in Science magazine, the risk analyst Chauncey Starr declared
that "a thing is safe if its risks are judged to be acceptable".
Hence, safety is a variable factor, indeed, one that varies over time. This
means that it is also malleable. In that sense, the mass media are the
mirror of what society is thinking and of its sense of values. But it is a
two-way relationship, in many ways, more or less subtle, the media can create
society's agenda. It can very easily pander to people's prejudices.
One evening I turned
on the television news and the top story was a train crash which had occurred
that afternoon at a place called Crevalcuore (which translates into English
rather aptly as "break-heart"). Nineteen people died when two trains
crashed head-on in fog on a single-track line. News is, of course, not merely a
question of reporting the facts, but also involves putting a spin upon them,
emphasising a particular angle, and selectively reporting the details.
Evidently in this case the television news editors had a grudge against the
state railways. The news bulletin gave the distinct impression that it would be
far safer to get on the motorway and drive like a maniac in thick fog than set
foot in a train. Trains are actually a very safe means of transport in Europe,
yet on a previous occasion the same news service had reported the deaths of six
passengers in a crash as a "massacre", while the deaths of six times
as many people in road accidents during the same weekend was treated as a
"normal", unexceptional statistic.
These rather crude
examples illustrate how the goalposts in the game of safety are constantly
being shifted. The threshold of what is considered tolerable and what is
treated as a disaster migrates over time. And of course it differs greatly from
one part of the world to another. A flash flood in Mogadishu killed 118 people,
but as it came at a time when conflict was raging in Somalia and there was
daily mortality due to fighting. Because, moreover, many vital life-support services
had broken down, the flood was hardly a disaster at all, or at least it was
hardly distinguishable from the disaster that was daily life.
Stalin once famously
observed that one death is a tragedy and a million deaths is a statistic—he
more than any of his contemporaries other than Hitler should have known.
Perhaps the great misfortune of our time is our ability to decouple large death
tolls from the human tragedy.
But let us return to
the information technology revolution. Disasters have always had a symbolic
value, and different cultures have ascribed to them different symbols and
associated them with interpretations. Following the Golden Bough of Sir
James Frazer, magic involves the covariance of unrelated actions, event and
consequence without a true cause and effect. The very term disaster,
"dis-astro", means "bad star" and thus refers to the role
of the stars and planets in causing extreme terrestrial events, or bad luck on
earth. Science has established a more enduring set of causal relationships
(although not without mistakes, setbacks, controversies and inaccuracies), but
curiously this has not led to the demise of symbolism, only its metamorphosis.
Nowadays, we talk
incessantly about 'icons'. Clearly, we do not mean venerated paintings of the
Madonna and Child. We mean reductive symbols. Whether they are small diagrams
or people who embody some characteristic (usually celebrity), the modern idea
of the icon is to be able to reduce reality to a simple, perhaps fleeting,
piece of symbolism. The symbolic value of disasters has changed—somewhat—but it
has not diminished.
In January 2012, the Costa
Concordia cruise ship foundered on a rock in the Tyrrhenian Sea and beached
on a Mediterranean island. Ships have always been a metaphor for society, and
perhaps that is one reason why churches have naves. We travel through time in
notional vessels and we endeavour to float on a sea of life made turbulent by
vicissitudes. And there on the Island of Giglio we had the biggest loss of a
passenger ship in history, for the Concordia is two and a half times the
size of the RMS Titanic. We also had a brave, thoroughly modern, venture
that came to grief on the unforgiving rocks of an ancient marine basin. Destiny
struck. It is perhaps small wonder that the Concordia was immediately
likened to the European economy, as it foundered on the recklessness of
bankers, the profligacy of governments and the tax avoidance of citizens.
Information
technology has greatly aided a process of separating the protagonists from the
bystanders. For the majority, disaster is a spectacle to be enjoyed. The
condiment sprinkled on top of each daily dose is the realisation that it is all
happening to someone else and one can be thankful for such deliverance. For the
sizeable minority, it represents suffering, hardship, pain and inconvenience.
We the privileged watch this from the ringside as if we were immune. We are
not.
I sometimes think
that international terrorism perpetrated in Western countries is nothing more
than an attempt to re-import the risk that such nations have so successfully
exported to the less privileged countries via the globalised economy and its
insistence on the exploitation of labour.
Meanwhile,
information technology has succeeded in inverting the status of victims. One
theory of disasters is that they are a source of moral outrage, which is
usually directed against the institutions that have signally failed to protect
citizens who put their faith in them. This, incidentally, forms part of a
general drift away from the concept of personal responsibility for bearing
risks. However resilient society has become, individuals in Western countries
are probably less resilient and less resourceful than they were sixty years ago
when the state could do relatively little to help them overcome the problems of
disaster. But now the individual can easily become the harbinger, or purveyor,
of moral outrage. Its handmaidens are the lawyers and accountants whose
presence has been substituted for common sense.
A century ago, or even
less, to be the victim of disaster was to bear a burden of disgrace and shame.
Nowadays, the victim may be featured on a chat show, is possibly on first-name
terms with a cabinet minister, and is certainly equipped with a powerful
weapon: moral outrage. There are, of course, those victims who use such
equipment to labour tirelessly and selflessly for the greater good of safety
and disaster risk reduction. There are others who exploit it for all it is
worth and assume the symbolic mantle for shameless self-aggrandizement. The
public's voracious appetite for personalities, and the ease with which
interactions can occur in the age of digital telecommunications, mean that the
less scrupulous protagonists of modern disaster are as likely to be applauded
as vilified.
Business continuity
management is the art and science of doing two things simultaneously. One is
keeping a crisis under control by tackling its root causes and its effects on
the ground. The other is vigorously defending the reputation of one's company.
Reputation equates to stock-market value, consumer confidence and a host of
other monetary variables. Of course, it can be difficult to defend a reputation
when the underlying crisis management is hopelessly inadequate, but there are
many who have tried. It is certainly a bad idea to manage a crisis faultlessly
with the exception of a plummeting reputation.
Hence, it is notable
that in the present age as much effort seems to go into creating the impression
that things are being done as goes into actually doing them. Hence we return to
virtual worlds. Disasters and crises are managed, and so, in parallel, is the
impression that they are being managed.
So, whether reality
is 'virtual' or real, we live increasingly in parallel worlds. The symbolic
value of disasters may be no less real than is risk, which in turn is no less
real than the actual impacts of disaster, but there are disjunctures between
all of these things. Noam Chomsky argued cogently that public consent is
manufactured, rather than obtained. Information is a primary resource and,
despite all the talk of free flows, it is quite still rigidly controlled. What
I mean here is that you can believe anything you like, but if too many people
believe "the wrong thing" then corrective action must be taken.
Official attitudes to
disasters on the part of governments are quite variable. Shame is often one of
them, along with concealment, political opportunism another. In some cases,
moreover, governments are as likely to listen to celebrities as they are to
scientific experts. Or perhaps I am being too negative. Dr Ilan Kelman has
shown, in more than 30 detailed examples, that disasters are often the occasion
for the renewal of diplomatic initiatives. The field of disaster diplomacy got
underway in 1999 after earthquakes in Greece and Turkey occurred in quick
succession. The two countries were at loggerheads over a territorial dispute,
but the mutual process of offering post-earthquake assistance jump-started the
diplomatic solution to their dispute.
Whatever the
attitudes of governments, and the efficacy, or not, of disaster diplomacy,
there is a growing consensus that we need a world community of disaster risk
reduction protagonists, composed of scientific experts and leading decision
makers. Information and communications technology, and mass travel, have
genuinely contributed to the creation of a 'global village' in which the plight
of disadvantaged people and their communities is now impossible to ignore.
As each of us
participates in global village life, we must adapt to changes, driven by
technology, that are faster and more profound than those our forebears had to
deal with. Let us try to make sure that we build a full pyramid: not merely
information, nut knowledge in the service of wisdom.