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Disinformation & Why People Believe It
If it feels like you’re being deluged with disinformation, left spinning in disbelief of how someone can be in such denial of reality and feeling a bit overwhelmed by it all, you’re not alone. It may help somewhat, to understand the root of why so many people it seems, believe what isn’t real.
Disinformation and misinformation are unintended consequences of the early days of this Digital Age. One of those issues we sort of knew about, but until it reached a global scale and impacted societies in more meaningful ways, we couldn’t really have prepared for.
Rather than look at the myriad forms of disinformation, which we see almost daily, I thought it might be interesting to put a cultural lens on the topic. To help understand why it takes off to begin with and why people do believe it, or may be tricked into believing it, which can also be dangerous.
It all boils down to one word. Storytelling. That’s the centre of the the whole issue. The nucleus of you will. Humans have used stories going back tat least 30,000 or so years and some think perhaps even 200,000 years. Which would suggest our non Homo Sapiens ancestors had such abilities.
Back to storytelling. Stories are how we make sense of our world. For ourselves and our communities. They are tied to myths, which we used to explain the reasons for things happening such as how the stars came to be in the sky, legends about creation or illness. Shamans relied heavily on myths (some still do) to excerpt their magical skills.
Stories give us a framework from which to make sense of the world. They also help inform our cultural identity. Such as the stories we tell about countries and regions we grew up in. They are deeply significant symbols of how we make sense of life and help build social cohesion, the formation of groups into communities and nations. Storytelling exists in every signle human culture.
Somehow, ancient humans inherently understood that biological evolution was too slow for our species survival. So we invented culture in what is called gene-culture coevolution. To help cultiure spread and be useful, we told stories.
