I’ve been avoiding news coverage of Wikileaks because it doesn’t fit into the neat political boxes I prefer. To understand an issue, I read responses from pundits with sympathetic opinions. In the wikileaks case, many of the responses from these people were ambivalent. Rather than take a simple pro/con stance, many of the articles I read about Wikileaks used the topic as a jumping off point to detail larger social and cultural changes, not just in the digital world but in our everyday lives. These changes–in how we get information, how we consume it, how we share it, and how we turn it into knowledge–have been in my mind for the past few months. Because they have been so central to my thinking, they are the prism through which I view almost everything, including the Wikileaks case. The conclusions I’ve come to have little to do with the details of the Wikileaks case and everything to do with our assumptions about information, the tools we need to understand information, and my role–as a teacher–in helping to forge these tools.
Lawrence Lessig’s article “Against Transparency” used the Wikileaks case to discuss how our shrinking attention spans have undermined the value of transparency. Transparency in government and corporations creates lots of data. Delving into that data requires time and patience. Rather than do that, we prefer to pick choice bits of the data that support our preconceptions about the institution that leaked the data. Not only has this been the response to the limited leaks from Wikileaks but it’s the stated intention of Assange and his supporters. Assange aims to support the individual at the expense of the institution. Rather than see the institutions as a body that serves the individual or even as a collection of individuals, Assange (and many of his supporters) assumes a central conflict between institution and individual.
Because we assume the institution to be bad, we automatically assume that the “raw information” will be damning. We believe that the information will speak for itself in a universal language that will condemn the actions of the institution as objectively immoral. We can agree that murder is immoral, but when the killing happens on a battlefield where identifying friend and enemy is difficult, the question gets a little murkier. This is where context gets added to the information that was just text. Wikileaks believes that the “raw information” they leak requires no context, but all texts (and the leaks are just another text that we humans read) require context. Without context, we cannot fully understand text. What Wikileaks is doing is providing their own context to the information. They do it implicitly with their assumptions about the institutions they are leaking about, and they do it explicitly in how they produce the video footage they release. Ravi Khatchadourian’s article “No Secrets” detailed Wikileak’s production of the video leak of civilian killings in Iraq and shows us how the production controlled the context in which viewers would see those videos: “Assange saw these events in sharply delineated moral terms, yet the footage did not offer easy legal judgments.”
The world is a collection of texts. The only means we humans have of understanding the world is reading those texts. To do so, we need context. Books help us discover context, not just in their physical form–title, page numbers, the structure of stories, and text structures–but in the way they are published and marketed. Furthermore, ever since we were read our first story, parents and schools have taught us about uncovering the contexts of texts. In the past, institutions have been major teachers of context. Institutions taught us how to understand texts whether they were religious texts, political texts, legislative texts, or literary texts. The Internet has allowed an unprecedentedly large avenue of rebellion against the authority of these institutions and their power over context. On the Internet, content makers can release their content on their own terms and try to control the context.
The problem with much of the “raw information” on the Internet is that people are apt to believe it is context-free. Videos, photographs, audio, and leaks are things we often believe can be understood objectively without context. What’s happening, however, is that the power of context is being ignored. We can extend Lessig’s argument about short attention spans to this case. Reading and understanding is about discovering the contexts of a text. Doing so requires time, attention, analysis, and discipline. There can be no such thing as raw information. Information is always understood in a certain context. We need to be vigilant about asking who is controlling that context, because context-controllers have a lot of power.
Even though we live in an age where information looks different than it used to, we as citizens and humans must read this information, not just for its content, but for the context in which that content is nestled. The skills of reading are centrally the same as they ever were: use our human tools to make sense of the world as a collection of human created texts.
