Fake news: when trust is eroded

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Fake news today, Covid-19 yesterday, and various terror risks in between: the things societies fear and that call for the attention of citizens are constantly changing. For Arndt Brendecke the question of vigilance opens up interesting perspectives across time and space. Brendecke is Chair of Early Modern History and speaker of the Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) “Cultures of Vigilance,” an interdisciplinary exploration of the historical and cultural foundations of vigilance. In this undertaking, the researchers do not focus on the well-investigated phenomenon of surveillance by institutions, but on the functions and effects of citizens monitoring each other.

Our interview with the historian shows that current warnings about fake news, which seem so timely in our era of technological developments, actually follow old patterns. Brendecke also reveals why the possibility of manipulation always lurks within the communication of dangers.

As a historian, you study the role of vigilance in societies. Do the frequent warnings today not to fall for fake news call to mind any historical parallels?

Arndt Brendecke: Calls for vigilance are as old as humanity. As good as the intentions might be, they often have an ambivalent and partially dysfunctional effect. Firstly, calls for constant vigilance are overwhelming because we cannot remain in a state of permanent alert. And secondly, they often do not specify precisely what we should be attentive to, nor to what extent we’re actually personally responsible for monitoring general dangers.

One of our research findings in “Cultures of Vigilance” shows that although one might suppose that a vague, underdefined danger is poorly communicated, these kinds of imprecise appeals are in actual fact highly effective. The gap is filled with people’s personal concerns, making it easy for people to connect with these alarms. Moreover, these appeals are highly flexible and adaptable. Almost anything that happens can be classed under this danger.

After 9/11, there was a campaign in New York that went: “If you see something, say something,” seeking to enlist the attention of the public in the fight against terror. The word “something” was crucial to the success of this campaign, as it did not specify what to look out for, nor what the danger consisted of.

Is there anything new, then, about current calls for vigilance?

Any information that gets through to us must be parsed for truth and falsehood. This is a basic challenge for humans as communicative beings. For all the advantages that language confers upon us in allowing us to learn about things we ourselves have not experienced, there is the concomitant danger of being deceived by the person communicating the information. When it comes to verbal communication, we’ve got a very precise sensory apparatus to evaluate credibility. We pay attention to tone of voice, gestures, the tiniest signs. In the age of print, we’ve also become sensitive readers of printed matter, as our subproject headed by Erika Thomalla and Carlos Spoerhase demonstrates from the perspective of literature and book studies.

In today’s ultra-dynamic media environment, with countless broadcasters and rolling news, where only the shrillest messages penetrate the noise, these tools are scarcely adequate anymore. Constant calls for vigilance that do not explain how to be vigilant overwhelm our cognitive capacities. They may even cause people to despair of truth and no longer trust anything or anybody.

Warnings about fake news are also perhaps not quite clear in specifying what people should watch out for. Would you agree?

I’m not a fan of the term ‘fake news’, I must say. I think its use undermines the concept of truth, but above all – and some actors do this quite deliberately – undermines trust in news provided by journalists. When sweeping claims are made about fake news, then we’re on a precipice where no news can be trusted anymore. If everything is fake prima facie, then the scope for manipulation is all the greater. We can see this play out in current political trends.

Understanding history with the help of vigilance

What makes the concept of vigilance fertile ground for historical research?

It’s a fascinating challenge to investigate how societies accomplish certain functions by linking the cognition of many people. This is a sort of basic formula for the efficiency of societies, which has received little academic attention to date. And this linkage works particularly well by leveraging attentiveness: I inform you about something you don’t know, but which could be dangerous for you or your group.

Vigilance, as defined by the CRC, is always ambivalent. It can be manipulative when people are alerted to false dangers. It is undergirded by claims to power, as anyone who watches or pretends to watch for others, will derive an entitlement from it.

You once said, “The history of vigilance reveals what societies are afraid of.” What did you mean by that?

Vigilance arguments have worked historically because they point out dangers – to our diet, environment, social harmony. At the same time, they give rise to claims of being able to protect societies from the danger. This is how fearmongering works, an approach that leans into the communication of dangers and presents itself as the solution to intractable problems. To this extent, danger communication is always political. Fearmongering can stir up paranoia, prompting people to reach for simple solutions. And conspiracy theories warn that behind it all, there is something else. Then nothing is as it seems. Such a crisis of evidence degrades people’s ability to concentrate on acute dangers. When everything is endangered, it may lead to nothing getting done.

Who’s actually issuing these calls for vigilance?

Everybody. This is another problem of the political dysfunctionality of appeals for vigilance. If one party calls for vigilance, then the others will do the same. Each claims to safeguard what is important, what is good, and posits the others as the greatest danger. As necessary as they often are, calls for vigilance are difficult to dose correctly. For the sake of impact, they escalate.

Corona: different attention, new rules

How quickly do these narratives change regarding what we should pay attention to?

During the Covid-19 pandemic, we all experienced how quickly attentiveness can change and how swiftly we could adapt our attention to a new danger. Suddenly, when somebody violated the social distancing rules in a supermarket, say, we perceived this as an almost deadly threat. This reveals, moreover, that we usually switch off many perceptions, or class them as unimportant, just so that we can be economic with our attentiveness and keep our stress levels in check.

The pandemic also demonstrated how quickly people are ready to denounce others when they do something ‘wrong’ according to new rules.

Exactly, we’re inexorably brought to the ambivalent decision of whether we should intervene and report people. Or whether we deem the person’s behavior to fall within an acceptable range. The role of private citizen is underdetermined, including with regard to the actual limits of our obligations. Are we obliged to intervene, as if we were an institution to a certain extent, on behalf of which we must act before returning to our private roles? Or do we have the right, and the choice, to look away? But inattentiveness, looking the other way, effectively means allowing something to happen that could potentially be dangerous to others or oneself. So, where do the boundaries of responsibility run and what do they mean for our societies?

A CRC subproject led by Gabriele Vogt investigates the coronavirus policies of the Japanese government. Instead of imposing a lot of rules, the Japanese government came up with the idea of promoting the supposedly ancient Japanese virtue of self-restraint (jishuku) and leaving it up to communities to evaluate and outdo each other in fulfilling this ideal.

Human responsibility and technological development

What is changing today with all the technologies that monitor dangers? Do we still need human vigilance?

People have never practiced vigilance in isolation, but always in arrangements. In conjunction with dogs, for instance, or indeed with spiritual beings such as guardian angels. We’ve become increasingly surrounded by technologies, starting out with simple things like spectacles and hearing aids. Some of these technologies can even overcome distance and take over certain perceptive tasks. But frequently, humans remain part of the reaction chain. A good example is the smoke alarm, which just makes noise and alerts humans to call the fire service. This also shows that such technologies often do not fully absolve humans of responsibility, but lead to a repositioning of residual human responsibility in technological arrangements.

You said earlier that calls to be vigilant and warnings of danger can lead to uncertainty. Does history tell us that this uncertainty decreases again?

Our research has not yet reached the point where we can draw a conclusion. But I do suppose that after a relatively shrill debate about dangers, there is a need to dial the drama back down. We can demonstrate this very clearly at the individual level. We cannot yet nail down the time as of which a society has the need to be less strongly informed about dangers, but trends are certainly discernible.

I get the impression that the prevailing mood in our current society is one of alarm. Would this be accurate?

Yes, for a variety of reasons. But the history of vigilance also tells us to be wary of permanent warning. That being said, I’m a historian, not an interpreter of the present or the future. I don’t issue any calls for vigilance, but study them. From the perspective of the past, however, I would emphasize the vital task of creating trustworthy media and institutional environments, in which this multi-paranoia, this fear of everything, can be dismantled again.

Collaborative Research Centre: “Cultures of Vigilance”

Cultures of Vigilance: Blog

The “Cultures of Vigilance” Collaborative Research Centre:

In the “Cultures of Vigilance” Collaborative Research Centre, researchers from various disciplines study questions of attentiveness in different historical, cultural, and social contexts. The period studied ranges from the Assyrian Empire to the present. Subprojects investigate topics such as the enforcement of dress codes in the Middle Ages, literary dynamics of observation, and changes in indigenous vigilance through drone technology in the Amazon.

“We want to improve our understanding of very specific contexts, with the goal of providing relatively generalized answers in the medium to long term. It takes a great deal of empirical study to see whether the phenomena you think you’re observing are random or form a pattern,” says Arndt Brendecke.

“For me, moreover, I’m always interested in how the humanities can engage with important topical questions. One such question is the repositioning of the individual and of groups within technological media arrangements, but also within the political structure. What is our responsibility? What are these paradoxes that reduce us to mere private consumers and yet make us responsible for solving all kinds of problems, invariably asking too much of individuals. We want our research to elucidate these strongly diverging signals.”

Prof. Dr. Arndt Brendecke is Chair of Early Modern History at LMU and speaker of the Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) “Cultures of Vigilance.” In his own research, he has investigated topics such as the history and cultures of Latin America.