Dangers of information abuse

So now we know. In the fog of Gulf War 2, terabytes of data about Iraq were sent back from GPS satellites and robot spyplanes and displayed on perhaps 100,000 giant flat screens and laptops. Yet despite all this, Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell never encountered information overload.

They selected the data they wanted and worked it up into two dossiers of insightful knowledge about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.

Nor did Blair and Campbell encounter the “knowledge economy”. IT does not generate knowledge. It is human beings who do that, and it is they who must answer Pontius Pilate’s famous question, “What is truth?”.

In 2003, boards ask IT chiefs to help direct strategy. In that context, IT chiefs still need to sit up and remember that today’s web-assisted plurality of information sources, channels and bits does not amount to knowledge.

True, the discovery of new pharmaceuticals, for instance, now relies on computer-automated molecular manipulation and evaluation. So, many imagine that IT really creates new ideas. It is also true that the web can transmit to patients every junk science prejudice about modern disease.

So, many believe that the web, thankfully, has dethroned an arrogant medical profession.

IT zealots forget the human factor in all this. It was a risk-averse Number 10 that turned an article by a doctoral student into a pretext for war. It is molecular biologists, with all the wisdom they have acquired over years of experiment, who bring new drugs into the world.

What has dethroned the medical profession is not the knowledge economy, nor even society’s flight from deferential attitudes, but its overbearing fear of risk. Medics are a risky proposition, the new thinking goes, because they are avuncular, unfeeling men, avariciously twisting their results to meet the needs of drug companies, and likely to steal your organs into the bargain.

That is why, aided by user-centred IT, we are supposed to need, as an alternative, patient-centred medicine, student-centred education and citizen-centred electronic elections a la Big Brother. IT, we are told, very properly opens up access to intellectual life to more people. All can be intellectuals now.

In Blair’s dossier crisis, there is nothing really new about either the official use of IT, or the official relapse into bellicose campaigns of disinformation. What is new is the unconscious but now universally popular view that everyone in authority is a dodgy, venal liar. And there is another, equally novel, unconscious and universal view that has grown up at the same time: that IT, when it is not a tool of surveillance, could be a countervailing force for transparency, democracy, sincerity and authentic feelings.

Such a relativistic argument tilts indiscriminately at all tradition and dresses up any kind of information as knowledge. But if all information is knowledge, there can be no hope of isolating the real contribution that IT makes to productivity. Unless IT professionals carefully uphold their genuine knowledge and rudely distinguish it from dubious information, they will not survive.