Today, digital technologies are changing our access to information in two ways: on the one hand, they considerably increase the flow of information that we receive on a daily basis; on the other hand, they modify our reading of reality by making circulate in the same communication channels elements belonging to very different registers: knowledge, beliefs, information, opinions, comments, fake news … And, inevitably, by dint of rubbing shoulders, the respective statuses of these various elements mutually contaminate each other.
So how do you distinguish knowledge from the belief of a particular community? A comment on a prejudice? One piece of information fake news ?
Human brains, which in their history had never been subjected to such a deluge of information, hardly know how to sort things out. They try to adapt as they can, without however letting go of their reluctance to see their productions contradicted, whether they be ideas, judgments, feelings or appreciations. Doesn’t every psyche demand mental quilts?
This situation seems to agree with Nietzsche, who prophesied, as early as 1878, in Human, too human, that the taste for truth would disappear as the truth guaranteed less pleasure. Certainly, more than ever, we proclaim our love for the truth, but perhaps it is more than a ritornello. Are digital technologies not, in fact, contributing to the gradual but surprisingly rapid advent of a new condition of the contemporary individual?
Once connected, individuals can now shape their own access to the world from their smartphone by choosing the digital communities that best suit them. In return, it is partially shaped by the content it receives all the time.
Thus he builds a sort of tailor-made world, of “ideological home” in resonance with himself. He does not necessarily have to desire it consciously: some of the communities likely to suit him can be offered to him by artificial intelligence algorithms capable of defining his psychological profile, his political inclinations and his cultural or intellectual tropism, this who can influence him even in his deepest beliefs and his idea of the truth.
What Alexis de Tocqueville called (in his famous work Democracy in America) “small societies”, that is to say kinds of clans with very homogeneous convictions and thoughts, the same relationship to the idea of truth and, in general, a certain cause to defend. These small societies are therefore in no way places of reflection or contradictory debates, as were the social salons of the 18th century.e century, but echo chambers of the collective thoughts of particular groups.
The overabundance of information would therefore have two consequences. First, it puts all the knowledge we receive into perspective, since, in the immensity of the data available, it is very difficult for us to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Faced with contradictory points of view, with “alternative” facts, with strong and antagonistic opinions, many people end up developing a cynical attitude, passing in a way from scientific doubt to absolute doubt.
During the most recent regional elections in France, those of June 2021, a record abstention rate was observed: 66% on average, 82% among young people. Some have spoken of a civic crisis, of being fed up, of “democratic fatigue”, of resentment with regard to political personnel … But wouldn’t part of the explanation also lie in an informational disillusionment?
Second, the overabundance of information facilitates the constitution of ideological niches. Capable of remaining in a vacuum thanks to the possibilities of digital networking, some, more and more numerous, are now more ready to campaign for the values - necessarily sectoral – of their group than for values more general or more distant from their own. commitments. Because in the eyes of those who are caught in the net of digital strata, it no longer seems really necessary that they agree through a “social contract” (in the sense of Jean-Jacques Rousseau), or even on the foundations of common coexistence. Nor that they appropriate the values and ideals embodied by republican institutions, since other values, essentially those which govern their digital community, may seem to them more important and more worthy of being defended.
A sort of primacy of the connected self or of the virtual community is thus set up over the institutional political order. Is it reasonable to believe that this trend affects young people more, because they spend more time in front of the screens than their elders? By the effect of a sort of paradox, their sectoral militancy would then prove to be compatible with their massive electoral demobilization.
This is how, in a world of information overproduction, we end up showing ourselves more inclined to declare true the ideas that we like than to like the true ideas …