To speak of the history of information is to conjure something that is present in all the periods and places that can be said to have histories, whether or not they happen to have had a word for it. But the appearance of the word does suggest that society had “entered into the self-conscious possession of a new concept,” as the historian Quentin Skinner puts it. Thus, in what follows, I’ll focus on the English word information, and particularly on the American setting. The development of its cognates in other nations and other Western languages was roughly parallel, though with some differences.
Over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, “information” was elevated to a kind of communication that played a crucial role in public life. At the same time, it was being reconceived as a self-sufficient and autonomous agent, as something “present” in the world. This is the sense of the word that we have in mind when we speak of information as essential to the health of democratic societies—something distinct from the kind of “information” we get from a weather channel, though the two are connected in important ways. It is the former sort of information that we have in mind when we speak of misinformation.
In the eighteenth century, excluding its legal meanings, information oscillated between two relevant primary senses. It could refer to an impression on the mind, “the formation or moulding of the mind or character,” as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it—and particularly, to the moral education instilled by reading (a meaning that was sometimes glossed with Latin educatio). As Emerson wrote in “The American Scholar,” “great and heroic men have existed, who had almost no other information than by the printed page.”
Through association with books and print, information came to denote their content, via a metonymy of “cause for effect”—that is, it was what induced the “information” of mind and character. The eighteenth-century essayist Vicesimus Knox pronounced his era “this age of information,” noting that the ease of acquisition of books made oral instruction (and, by extension, the university) less necessary. As such, the diffusion of information assumed a public importance; in The Idler, Samuel Johnson wrote: “National conduct ought to be the result of national wisdom, a plan formed by mature consideration and diligent selection out of all the schemes which may be offered and all the information which can be procured.”
That view of the role of information was the kernel of the modern understanding that emerged in the nineteenth century. In “The Storyteller,” Walter Benjamin described information as a “form of communication” that emerged with “the full control of the middle class, which has the press as one of its most important instruments in fully developed capitalism.” This description points to the two conditions that the modern phenomenon of information rests on: the rise of a large middle-class citizenry and the appearance of new forms of representation that served its interests. Benjamin is among those who stress the appearance of the modern mass newspaper—ostensibly apolitical, increasingly “objective” and professionalized, uniform in style and organization, and sold to a vast readership for a low price on a copy-by-copy basis.
But the new notion of information was also connected to the appearance of the modern “reference work,” such as the “national” dictionaries and *encyclopedias of Brockhaus, Webster, and Larousse. It battened, too, on the census reports, parliamentary blue books, and other government publications that engendered what the philosopher Ian Hacking has described as “the avalanche of printed numbers,” which brought the term statistics into general usage. In the commercial sector, the growth of managerial organizations led to the emergence of printed schedules, work rules, and forms.
Still, “information” was most closely associated with the role of the press, a relation made explicit in other languages. The French distinguished between a presse d’information (focused on reporting) and a presse d’opinion (devoted to commentary); the function of the former, Emile Zola wrote in 1886, was “to bring information to public awareness.” In the singular, the French information could be used to refer to a bit of news (as it could in English until the nineteenth century); in the plural les informations referred to news reports (in recent times truncated to les infos). More broadly, in French and Italian the word could denote as well the collection of news or the instruments of its diffusion, as in une information libre, “a free press.” Jules Verne depicted the intrepid American journalist hero of his 1874 novel The Mysterious Island as an un véritable héros … de l’information, “a true hero of news.”
The association of information with the press and other printed documents shaped the way it was perceived, as a self-sufficient substance detached from its source and independent of any individual consciousness. This is one of the important ways in which information differs from knowledge, which always requires a knowing subject—an individual, a collectivity, or at the limit a text, which serves as a proxy for its author. We speak of “human knowledge,” for example, but we don’t ordinarily speak of “human information”—we don’t identify information in terms of its possessors. “Medical knowledge” refers to the body of knowledge possessed by members of the medical community, whereas “medical information” refers simply to information about medical matters, wherever it happens to reside. As the sociologist Alvin Gouldner observed, information doesn’t require a specific knower: it is “a product that can be found in a cardfile, a book, a library, a colleague, or some other ‘storage bank.’ ”
The self-sufficiency of information altered its evidential value in a way that Benjamin was getting at when he compared information to intelligence: “The intelligence that came from afar … possessed an authority which gave it validity, even when it was not subject to certification. Information, however, lays claim to prompt verifiability. The prime requirement is that it appear ‘understandable in itself.…’ It is indispensable for information to sound plausible.” The authority of a piece of intelligence rested on one’s trust in the reliability of its source, in the same way the value of a note of hand rested on the credit and reputation of the person who signed it, whereas the authority of information is folded into the form of the communication itself. We walk past a window and hear a voice on the radio announcing the result of a local election; we accept the statement unreservedly, without having to know who the announcer is or what station we’re listening to, solely in virtue of the form of communication. The sound of the announcer’s voice is sufficient to evoke the whole apparatus of commercial broadcasting. In the same way, the style and material form of a nineteenth-century newspaper report evoked the apparatus of print journalism; one was supposed to be able to take a report on faith simply because it appeared in the (right) newspaper—it was, as Benjamin put it, “understandable in itself.” In whatever form we encounter it—in a newspaper, a book, a broadcast, a road sign, a statistical table—we describe a representation as information only when its form alone seems to index the reliability and authority of the institutions that created it. We should bear in mind that this is a phenomenal experience that neither Adam Smith nor Condorcet could ever have had. They knew only “intelligence” and would not have thought of accepting the truth of a text on the basis of its form alone, in the absence of any knowledge of its source.
While the “moral instruction” sense of information had largely disappeared by the mid-nineteenth century, it left its traces in the implication that the “information” provided by printed documents was an essential component of citizenship. By the time of the US Civil War, the political importance of information had become an article of national faith. It was by diffusing information that the press and analogous institutions shaped the political consciousness of the public and enabled public opinion to crystalize and make itself known. In 1884, an article in the Century magazine called “The Political Education of the People” noted: “We are indebted to the press for nearly all our information about the condition of public business and the course of events at home and abroad; and it is safe to say that without such a source of information the conduct of popular government, in so large a country as ours, would be very difficult, if not impossible.”
A similar conviction animated the American public library movement, which was to provide a model for other nations. In 1852, the trustees of the Boston Public Library proclaimed that “it is of paramount importance that the means of general information should be so diffused that the largest possible number of persons should be induced to read and understand questions … which we, as a people, are constantly required to decide.” Educators stressed the importance of achieving universal *literacy (a term that first appeared in the United States in the 1880s in the sense “ability to read and write”), while at the same time numerous states instituted literacy qualifications for voting, which in some notorious cases were used to disqualify minority voters.
The more reliant society became on the “informational system” that coordinated the diffusion of information and the formation of public opinion, the more anxious people became about its limits and breakdowns, as reflected in the emergence of a new vocabulary to describe informational abuse and misfire. Some of these words were old ones repurposed. English misinformation went back to the seventeenth century to refer to the act of misinforming someone or to a misleading report. But the word was rare until the late nineteenth century, when it came to be used for false or misleading press reports and official communications; its frequency in major American newspaper stories rose more than tenfold between 1870 and 1920.
“Fake news” emerged in the 1890s, when fake itself caught on, first in America, as a slang term for something that masquerades as the genuine thing. Propaganda was an obscure and recondite word until World War I, when it was attached to the public relations campaigns of the contending governments. Given wide currency by the international press, it rapidly “passed into the vocabulary of peasants and ditch diggers and began to acquire its miasmic aura,” as the journalist Will Irwin wrote in 1936.
I will use misinformation here as a cover term for this vocabulary, though the word is unique to English. Other languages have coined phrases or adapted colloquial words to similar effect: Italian cattiva informazione and balle, German Fehlinformation and Quatsch, French fausses nouvelles and bobard (a fabrication aimed at deceiving the public). Disinformation and its cognates entered Western languages during the Cold War period as a translation of the Russian dezinformatsiya, originally used by the KGB to describe false reports concocted to mislead public opinion (the word is sometimes credited to Stalin himself). The English fake news was universalized, initially to refer to misleading or deceptive stories circulating on social media, then, following President Donald Trump’s precedent, adopted by autocrats to dismiss unfavorable coverage of their regime, a usage that in turn has led media organizations and some governments to cease using it.
The choice of one or another of these words can depend on, among other things, whether the claims referred to are false or simply misleading, whether they are deliberate attempts at deception or widespread misconceptions, or whether they are produced by governments or corporations or individuals. Nonetheless, the words share two defining features, which misinformation exemplifies. First, misinformation is obviously a kind of information, in the same way that a misconception is a kind of conception and a misspelling is a spelling. In particular, moreover, it’s the sort of information that is diffused by a public medium such as a newspaper, a government report, or a radio broadcast, distinguishing these words from the older vocabulary of mendacity, words like lie, falsehood, untruth, prevarication, and the like, which can apply to speech acts between any individuals, in private or public, and touching on any subject. A teenager who falsely tells her parents she was studying at the library can be said to have told them a lie, but not (other than in jest) to have conveyed misinformation or fake news. Of course, we can apply lie and falsehood for the remarks of specific public figures, as well. But the agent who diffuses misinformation is often unknown and may not even be discoverable (a problem that haunts efforts to contain it on social media).
But the prefix mis- also indicates that misinformation is an aberrant form of information, with the implication that in the normal case, information is regarded as correct or reliable. Or, to paraphrase the slogan of the cyberlibertarians who insist that “information wants to be free,” we might say that information wants to be true. That is both a descriptive and a normative statement. As a rule, I assume that the statements you label as information are more often true than not, unless you qualify the word with a modifier like “questionable.” Unlike report or account, that is, information carries with it a presumption of confidence in the forms and institutions that report it. Indeed, information in this sense of the term is better thought of as an evidential as opposed to an *epistemological notion.
But we also hold, normatively, that information ought to be true, or even more urgently, that it needs to be true. Yet we’re always aware how leaky the system is. The history of misinformation and related terms reflects a ceaseless series of crises of faith in the informational order.
In the late nineteenth century, the dangers of misinformation were most often raised in diatribes over the influence of the popular press, for which every nation coined its own disparaging name: the yellow press, the gutter press; the presse à scandale, the Boulevardpresse, the riooljournalistiek, and so on. In an 1896 commentary, for example, the New York Times drew the attention of “every true and patriotic citizen” to the partisan press that sought to mislead the people with “whole columns of ‘fake’ news [and] sensational ‘stuff,’ ” whose editorial policies were dictated by commercial interests. Such things, it said, were “shocking to our ideals of democracy.” The Times urged readers to forswear their reverence for print: “distrust of the press is the cure for the evil.” Such complaints often conveyed a certain Olympian condescension. The decorous Times trafficked in *facts and was aimed at the “great cultivated, well-to-do class,” as one admirer put it—its early motto was “It does not soil the breakfast table”—as opposed to the sensational penny press, bristling with cartoons and color illustrations and flavored with publicity stunts, jingoism, and political scandal for the entertainment of the urban masses.
In one form or another, those themes recur in polemics about misinformation from the nineteenth century to the present day, apportioning blame between the partisan or mercenary promulgators of misinformation and the credulous and easily distracted public whose members are unequipped to evaluate it critically. Often, as in the Times’s commentary, it was the establishment press and institutions that were exalted as the sources of reliable information. But the argument could also be turned around.
The flood of Allied and German propaganda in World War I provoked a heated debate over the abuse of propaganda—the systematic effort of governments, or often corporate interests, to manipulate public opinion. The word propaganda itself soon fell into disrepute; in most languages, it evoked jingoistic ballyhoo aimed at whipping up public enthusiasm for war and sacrifice. (In some languages, like Spanish and Portuguese, the word simply means advertising.) Governments avoided it—during the war the British propaganda efforts were consigned to the Ministry of Information, and when America entered the war, Woodrow Wilson created the Committee on Public Information, charged with rousing support for the war effort—though its press releases, which often played fast and loose with the truth, led the Times to dub it the “Committee on Public Misinformation.”
After the war, concern focused on less dramatic techniques for controlling public opinion. Some still spoke of propaganda, but a better name for this would be misinformation, which is indistinguishable in its form from legitimate information. This was the era of the birth of the modern press agent and “scientific” advertising (which had played a role in shaping British and American war propaganda); in 1932, the city editor of the New York Herald Tribune estimated that half the news items in the daily press originated with public relations firms. Some maintained that such intervention was necessary. In 1928, Edward Bernays wrote approvingly of the “invisible government” charged with “the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses [that] is an important element in democratic society.” Left to their own devices, he said, the masses would be unable to come to a conclusion about anything. Walter Lippmann underscored that point, arguing that the ordinary citizen was more-or-less helpless before the complexities and subtleties of matters of public concern, and largely indifferent to them: as he put it, “The facts far exceed our curiosity.” Others found the prospect abhorrent. In The Public and Its Problems (1927), John Dewey inveighed against those who were skilled at “enlisting upon their side the inertia, prejudices and emotional partisanship of the masses by use of a technique which impedes free inquiry and expression” so as to create “a state of government by hired promoters of opinion” and which produced “a social situation in which neither truth nor the basic values of civilization get a fair hearing.” In 1929, the psychologist Everett Dean Martin warned that “a public ruled by an ‘invisible government’ becomes like its rulers.… Its hero is anyone who, by whatever cheap device, succeeds in capturing its attention. In this manner it is encouraged to worship itself, its own power, and the cheap greatness it can bestow.”
Those debates prefigure a long line of commentary and polemic that subjects the dominant discourse of “legitimate information” to critical scrutiny. The advent of the *internet initially promised to give new life to this counterdiscourse: as one influential blogger wrote, “The power of elites to determine what [is] news via a tightly controlled dissemination system [has been] shattered.” In the event, however, the spread of the *internet and the rise of social media have triggered a widespread sense of a “misinformation crisis,” as signaled in ubiquitous headlines like: “How the Information Age Became the Disinformation Age,” “L’ère de la désinformation,” “La Disinformazione, vero virus di quest’epoca,” and “Eine Zeit der Fehlinformation.” These breakdowns in the informational order are usually seen as effects of the internet and social media, but some of the causes antedate them: a decades-long decline in trust in government, the media, and other institutions and the increasing political polarization of the public and the media. Those tendencies are more marked in some countries than others, but they everywhere encourage a degree of public skepticism about any single dominant narrative.
But the internet clearly amplifies those tendencies by eliminating constraints on the production and diffusion of information. The effect is to democratize both misinformation and its remedies. The internet bristles with rumors, canards, hoaxes, misapprehensions, falsehoods, and fallacies as well as with refutations and debunkings of them. But most lack the signs that formerly enabled people to discern legitimate information in the world of material communication, and for a great many people the fact that something appears “on the internet” is good enough, if it’s congenial to their worldview. At the limit, the new climate fosters a pathological cynicism: the precept “Don’t believe everything you read” has yielded to “Believe whatever you like.”
Technology has made it easy to “spoof” legitimate sources (a term that numerous languages have adopted from computer science to refer to forging or emulating a web page, a phone number, or an email address). In the past, no one could produce a plausible-looking newspaper or television news show without considerable resources, much less circulate it to a large or remote public. At best, a marginal group could promote its ideology only by sending a newsletter to the people on its mailing list or passing it around as underground samizdat. Now anybody anywhere in the world can work up a credible-looking home page for a fictitious Denver Guardian or Action12news.com, fill it with spurious news stories and sensational headers, and count on the members of a sympathetic network to pass it along to others in their political ecosystem, whether in the hope of influencing an election or merely harvesting clicks for ads. Facebook estimates that 126 million people might have seen the material posted by the Russian troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency between 2015 and 2017, a figure that exceeds the reach of any domestic source of legitimate information.
Debate over how—or whether—the current flood of misinformation can be stanched, throttled, or made less detrimental has led to both supply- and demand-side proposals. Algorithms can help identify misinformation, with the assistance of human reviewers; its promulgators can then be blocked from posting to a social media site, demoted in search, or disincentivized by preventing them from running ads. On the demand side, citizens need to be able to evaluate what they read more critically. Stanford University researchers have described students’ inability to assess online information as “bleak,” “shocking,” and “a threat to democracy,” in an uncanny echo of the words of the Times commentary about the yellow press more than a century earlier. Educators have stressed the need for teaching media literacy, reviving the kinds of programs that took off after World War II to counter the effects of propaganda on the public: the French Ministry of Culture has launched an extensive program aimed at enabling students to spot junk information online. But such programs can be caught up in ideological firestorms over the very facts that students are supposed to be learning to discern.
At present, though, it is difficult to see how any of these expedients—technological, institutional, or economic—can restore the informational order that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century. It can be argued that the challenge of a “post-truth” era has actually strengthened the legitimate press and other institutions of the traditional informational order, but their authority is increasingly circumscribed. It may be, as the book Network Propaganda suggests, that “as a public we have lost our capacity to agree on shared modes of validation as to what is going on and what is just plain wacky.”
Geoffrey Nunberg
See also algorithms; digitization; learning; libraries and catalogs; media; newspapers; public sphere; reference books; social media; teaching