How the Internet is freeing conspiracy theories from the control imposed by traditional media

From The New Information Order

In the pre-Internet age, our society had an order of information in which knowledge was managed by experts and authorities, as well as representatives of the political, legal, scientific, medical and economic powers-that-be. Academics, scientists, spokespersons for the state and the owners, producers and editors of the major media decided what was real and what was unreal, what was true and what was false. The upside of this was that an awful lot of utter nonsense did not find mainstream distribution. The downside was that some material was misclassified as unreal or false – either by error, or because of interest group pressure, ideology or group-think.

The Internet threatens all this by speeding up circulation of unofficial data and simply bypassing the official information authorities. Crucially, it enables the creation and distribut­ion of pure speculation or outright lies without significant legal hazard.

In the pre-Internet 'knowledge order', the label 'conspiracy theory' was one of the key management tools of the powers-that-be, enabling the denigration of a political or historical proposition without it having to be falsified. In the post-1964 sections of Dr Christ­opher Andrew's 1,000-page history of MI5, In Defence of the Realm (Allen Lane, 2009), Andrew, as the spokesman for MI5, repeatedly dismisses the claims of critics of the agency as “conspiracy theories”. Based on the notion of an authority being allowed to see the official records of a secret agency, to report back that all is well and that the agency's critics are simply misinformed or conspiracy theorists, Andrew's book looks like one of the last hurrahs of the old information order.

Elsewhere, though, the new order is lapping at the feet of the old. The first big breakthrough from the margins of the cybersphere to the major media in this country was when, on 27 Sept­ember, the BBC's Andrew Marr asked Prime Minister Gordon Brown: “A lot of people in this country use prescription painkillers and pills to help them get through. Are you one of them?”

In the furore which followed, it was revealed that Marr had no evidence other than the “evid­ence” which lots of other people (including this writer) had: emails circulating which suggested that Brown was taking a particular antidepressant. It was the first time in this country that something so sensitive and potentially damaging had made its way from the Internet into mainstream TV politics – from unregulated to regulated screens, as it were.

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