Information Hegemony

Recently in the news, it has come to light that the U.S. has spent considerable sums of money to control information in Iraq and Afghanistan, creating propaganda to (ineffectively) sway the hearts and minds of the native people.  Also recently the reporters from USA Today who wrote about this “information operations” spending have had false websites and message board posts created using their identities.  Whether or not these attacks were the work of officials in the government, this example does illustrate how malicious the discourse of ideas in America has gotten.  Of course reading these articles drew strong flashbacks to the DOE e-mails and their opinion of Diane Ravitch.  It’s saddening because in all these examples we can see representatives of our government acting in the exact opposite manner as a democracy should.  They are using information to discredit, slander, or control people instead of empowering them and acknowledging their right to think for themselves. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that it’s a conspiracy; to me it’s more reflective of a type eat-or-be-eaten corporate mentality that (strongly) discourages thinking outside the box.  These kinds of behaviors erode the very principals of democracy, singling out people for different beliefs and making them victims for those beliefs, all in the name of the bottom line.

The DOE e-mails were particularly frustrating because of the outright dismissal of ideas contrary to what were presented as the better answer.  Granted, these electronic interactions were only a fraction of the overall conversation that was going on, but it would be nice to see some self-evaluation and reflection on the part of the reformers.  We talked in class about how good teachers self-evaluate, questioning if students got a question wrong because they didn’t study enough or because the question was presented poorly.  Here there didn’t seem to be a lot of reflection going on to me.  Which is a shame because in the middle of the disparaging remarks about teachers’ unions and the promotion of hard-line testing, there were hints of really great ideas, such as tracking and supporting students after graduation and giving teachers and principals more autonomy.  There seems to be a climate within political dialogue today of constant blame and fear…fear of being wrong.   School is supposed to inspire people to always strive for improvement, to try to be better.  I understand the need to show a united front for national confidence and morale, but it is troubling that policy makers and corporate reformers seem to feel they have all the answers when they are but a small fraction of the people invested in making schools better.

Links to the articles mentioned above: http://www.usatoday.com/news/military/story/2012-02-29/afghanistan-iraq-military-information-operations-usa-today-investigation/53295472/1 

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/story/2012-04-19/vanden-brook-locker-propaganda/54419654/1