Wrong

a quick review of Dannagal Goldthwaite Young's new book

Towards the end of his post on “pump-and-dump” books, Cory Doctorow said something that stuck with me (and not only because it offered an interesting twist on the lottery ticket metaphor):

Every book is a lottery ticket, but the bezzlers¹ are buying their tickets by the case: every time you tell someone about a book you loved (and even better, why you loved it), you buy a writer another ticket.

As I thought about it, the more convinced I grew that I should share more of my reading publicly, and not only as a springboard for my own preoccupations (although those will figure prominently, I suspect).

[The other thing I’m going to do from here on out (as you might have noticed from earlier links) is linking book titles to their pages on bookshop.org. I’ve been using Google Books as my preferred Amazon alternative, but Bookshop donates proceeds to independent bookstores in addition to providing that alternative.]

Therefore, as I’ve been promising, I want to say a few things about Dannagal Goldthwaite Young’s new book, Wrong: How Media, Politics, and Identity Drive Our Appetite for Misinformation. Interestingly enough, I came across it while I was looking for work on irony, especially by folks in my own field (and its neighbors), and happened upon her earlier book Irony and Outrage. While Wrong wasn’t as quite on the nose, it was probably more relevant to the context that I’m building out here, so I went ahead, picked both of them up, and read the second book first.

Young’s book does something that is rare (sadly) for books of this sort; at its outset, it provides an information graphic that lays out much of the book for us.

There are two ways that I’d describe Young’s book, and the first is that it’s cartographic. It spends a great deal of time mapping out this ecology of identity formation and the various forces that come to bear on it. Young explains that “the things we ‘know’ are the result of a complex interaction between our values, needs, and beliefs and our observations of the world, which operate together in service of our social identity—our sense of what team we identify with.” That’s basically the hermeneutic circle represented by numbers 1 through 4 of the diagram. We’re not worried so much about accuracy (getting ir right or wrong) as much as “[we] are motivated to understand [our] world (comprehension), have agency (control), and be socially connected with a sense of belonging (community)” (21). (Those are the 3 Cs.) Much of Part I of her book is spent explicating this more personal system, considering how the 3 Cs interact, etc.

The book sets out to revalue how we understand “being wrong,” and this personal context is important for that. Young writes,

I propose that we understand wrongness as a complex set of dynamics fueled by a political and media environment that draws on and actively constructs our social identities, thus leaving us with more culturally resonant and distilled political identities every single day (23).

This is pretty crucial, and it resonates with my own take on conspiracism. Too often, we treat conspiracy theories (and those who endorse them) as necessarily deficient, or bad actors. And sometimes that may be true. But at their root, conspiracy theories are among the ways that we make sense of the world. Young emphasizes early that our desires for comprehension, control, and community aren’t really about evidence—they are, in her words, “the trifecta of meaning-making.”

The second half of the book, appropriately enough, deals with the forces that make up that broader system that she maps out: political messaging, news norms, partisan media, and social media (#s 5-9 on the diagram). And this is where Young really gets at the subtitle of her book. We all form our identities by building up personal schemes of heuristics, based upon the 3 Cs, allowing us to make meaning and sense of the world (and people) around us. However,

sometimes we find ourselves in an environment in which cues are manipulated and used strategically to exploit our efficient heuristic processes. They refer to this as a “hostile” information environment. And in a hostile information environment, our heuristic responses may lead us astray (123).

Except for a chapter at the end devoted to some possible solutions, the second half of the book carefully details how those four forces have combined to create what we might consider that hostile information environment. I think it’s important to note, though, that unlike, say, a “hostile work environment,” where an individual is being treated badly by co-workers, bosses, company policies, etc., the information environment’s “hostility” operates at a different scale. That is, our contemporary media environment, given its fragmentation, is divided up into lots of pieces, many of which are focused very narrowly on reinforcing (and distilling) our identities. Neither FOX nor MSNBC are “hostile” to their target audiences. The larger system, though, is hostile to a healthy democracy and it can be challenging to see from within it.

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I said that the first term I’d use to describe the book is cartographic; the second I’d pick is synthetic. Young comes from a Communications background, and she is careful throughout this book to cite studies (some of which I’d read) to support the connections among the different chapters and indeed the entire system itself. In other words, this book synthesizes a great deal of contemporary work in (political) communication and psychology, and arrives at a pretty convincing account of our current circumstances. She argues persuasively that our information environment is focused on (and incentivized for) identity distillation, and polarization is one of its more pernicious effects (as opposed to a root cause).

I mentioned last week that this was a book that I was happy to read, even though it was well outside of anything that I myself might do, and that’s certainly true. It’s a tremendously useful book. Much of what she discusses resonates with my own sense of things, and there are some arguments (and citations) that I’ll return to in my own writing, I suspect. My own approach to the topic tends to be a little bit more rhetorical (and humanistic), but I don’t want this to sound like I’m trying to damn Young with faint praise.

I’ll close with a pretty strong encapsulation of the book that comes from its final chapter:

Being wrong isn’t about believing factually inaccurate pieces of information. It’s not even about believing lies people tell us. It’s about our psychological and social needs: our need to understand our world (comprehension), have agency within it (control), and feel socially connected to people on our team (community) (225).

If I were to nitpick just a bit, it would only be to suggest that titling the book Wrong felt a little off to me. I don’t think this book is really about “being wrong,” but rather about the way that the identity distillation Young describes induces us to dismiss each other as “wrong” way too quickly. She does what she can throughout to earn the title, but the wrongness she talks about is more systemic than individual (the “political and media environment” mentioned above). Much like the idea of a “hostile information environment” references one scale (global) by riffing on another (personal), this book is less about us (personally) being more willing to admit we’re wrong (although that can be important, too) and more about seeing the wrongness embedded in the broader (global) ecologies that surround us. But like I said, that’s a nitpick—one that may have had more to do with Young’s publisher than Young herself. If this book sounds like it overlaps with your own interests, I recommend it to you.

1. If you’re curious about this word, allow me to recommend Doctorow’s new Martin Hench novel, The Bezzle, where you’ll learn, among other things, that the term was coined by John Kenneth Galbraith, to describe “the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it.” I pre-ordered the book and finished it within 24 hours of receiving it. Unraveling intricate scams (and defeating them) is like catnip for me. It’s not the only kind of book I like, but it’s high on my list. If you like Doctorow’s writing, you’ll enjoy it.