Informational pathologies and interest bubbles: Exploring the structural mobilization of knowledge,ignorance,and slack

Misunderstanding the structure: the pigeon hole

The letter of individual notification, which Nykredit/Totalkredit chose to use as a messaging system for informing its clients/members regarding the increase in contribution margins, may graphically be represented in an umbrella-like figure: one sender of one piece of information to many, independent members. Metaphorically, one may refer to this message system as the pigeon hole (PH) (Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

The pigeon hole: the information structure where one node sends information to many nodes.

A prerequisite for the PH model is that multiple receivers cannot interact with each other while receiving the individually addressed letter. Members are separate receivers of information, and dispersed in such a way that it is not likely that communication between them occur immediately. As such, the receivers are an aggregate conglomerate connected to the sender on a one-to-one basis.

The PH information network structure may be used with expediency when identical pieces of information need to be communicated to the corresponding aggregate conglomerate, denoted a cluster. A cluster is often homogenous because all its members, qua membership, have the same status and are hence largely qualitatively nondifferentiable. Periodic updates such as newsletters or software tweaks are often effectuated by organizations through the PH network structure when relatively harmless or easy-digestible information is being communicated or downloaded by clients.

However, this mode of communication does not actually correspond to the type of organization that Nykredit/Totalkredit is. It is not an organization whose clients or members are dispersed to such a degree that they refrain from communicating. It is an association (or at least was until recently) where its members are gathered around a particular area of interest, in this case loans and mortgages. Members of an association are, by the very nature of being associated, connected through a cause, a profession, theme, interest, or hobby (e.g. medicine, charity, politics, or boat-sailing). Not only do members have an established interest (in their agglutinated association) to exchange opinions and viewpoints pertaining to their common cause or interest, but they certainly also have knowledge about one thing: that every other member of the association has taken out a loan or mortgage with this real-estate credit union. By logical consequence, this is merely the definition of what it means to be a member or client of this very union or association.

Common knowledge

If members, therefore, receive a letter in the capacity of their membership, as mortgagor, then they know that every other member correspondingly possesses this knowledge as he or she also received the letter, as well as they know that all other members know that they know (i.e. possess this type of knowledge) and so on. This reciprocal exercise qualifies as common knowledge: the common element is that everybody knows that every other member knows that every other member possesses information relating to the forthcoming increase in his or her contribution margins.

In an interconnected network, common knowledge is an extremely valuable epistemic state as it makes the network informationally transparent with respect to known facts among the agents. Common knowledge assures this transparency of knowledge on all higher levels as opposed to a network in which everyone simply believes that every other member also thinks the same thing, or as opposed to a network in which knowledge is mutual (Figure 2) among the members but without the transparent higher order element that common knowledge (Figure 3) implements.

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Figure 2.

Mutual knowledge of proposition p for agent a and b but without a knowing that b knows p and vice versa.

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Figure 3.

Common knowledge of proposition p for agents a and b with a knowing that b knows p, b knowing that a knows p, a knowing that b knows that a knows p, and so forth for all higher order levels.

Say that knowledge is mutual in a network, if every agent knows the same–some proposition p (Figure 2). That every agent knows p does not reveal nor entail anything about what individual agents know about the knowledge of other agents, their potential knowledge of some proposition p, or their knowledge of knowing p and so forth. This shortage of higher order commonality, assurance, and conjoined transparency make networks of mutually knowing agents less informationally potent, and powerful, than they would have been had they enjoyed common knowledge. An authoritarian CEO or statesman is rarely ousted even when everyone desires him or her dethroned if there is a lack of common knowledge of this desire in the group. Every agent wants to get rid of the leader but does not know that everybody else feels the same way about him or her nor knows that everybody shares this sentiment.

The lack of common knowledge makes coordination of a joint effort to get rid of the leader tricky as members may be in doubt as to what others think, and mutual sentiments of repugnance do not suffice for joint action. The same goes even when it comes to distributed knowledge as the aggregate knowledge of the entire population still falls short of a ticket to joint action, given the depletion of higher order information about knowledge of knowledge of other agents required for coordinated action and the adherent scarcity of transparency and assurance.

The successful implementation of organizational strategies in a firm, the mobilization of masses in politics, religion, and businesses, as well as the possibility of collective decision and action is in no small measure reliant on the imparted or stored knowledge that is available within a population, which may be mutual, distributed, or common knowledge.

Given the similar interests of the members or mortgagors in the Nykredit/Totalkredit case, one may expect a certain aligned joint reaction to the announced increased contribution margins. Each member may voice his or her individual dissatisfaction; one signal of dissatisfaction per member may be returned to Nykredit/Totalkredit but that does not make for a bull-horn joint voice to be heard by the association—by the board of directors, the other members and mortgagors, or by the public. The disparage knowledge network needed, so to speak, an outlet or a platform, which could collect all the voices, and distribute the common knowledge of dissatisfaction to other members of the network and coordinate a collective response and joint action back to the source of the problem.

Facebook was the answer; a single member created a Facebook group for all mortgagors of Nykredit/Totalkredit to join. ³ Not only could all of the 500,000 clients or members thus communicate—getting further assurance that almost all members of the association too were dissatisfied with the advertised increase, but every member could also invite his or her Facebook friends, who did not belong to the internal network of the Nykredit/Totalkredit membership quota. In this way, members organically organized a rapid extension of the network through Facebook by conjoining nonassociative networks: these networks, however, still shared the discontent for whatever the reason—sympathy with their friends or fury over the greed of the financial world.

This self-organizing mobilization broke fiercely with Nykredit/Totalkredit’s PH strategy that informed its members on an individual basis. Yet, at the same time, this strategy was the initial source, which enabled common knowledge to permeate the system: clients/members were informed in distinct, but not unconnected, information nodes. The connection, to be sure, was simple deductive reasoning and the sufficing channel of a single information-mobilizing valve: the Facebook group for discontented clients/members (Figure 4). Through this group, the rest of the members were mobilized along with the members’ networks as well as media, journalists, and other interested parties who suddenly raised the case to a level of public awareness until the politicians also got involved.

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Figure 4.

The mobilized discontent assembled on a Facebook-enabled platform via common knowledge about the discontent among members and “friends” of members.

What should have been a one-to-one correspondence became in fact one-to-many communication, which mobilized itself from many-to-even-more, and returned a signal of discontent of a magnitude never expected, which again was followed up by general political reverberation ⁴ (Figure 5).

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Figure 5.

The aggregated information signal sent back from the Facebook platform to Nykredit/Totalkredit, press/media, politicians, and other stakeholders.

Physical and virtual reality

There are two dimensions to this case—the physical and virtual reality. ⁵ In the latter, thousands were interacting, participating, and registering their discontent while promising online to attend the event physically—bodies in place, vases in hand. The online–physical dynamics seem to follow Mercea’s (2012) concept of digital prefigurative participation “in offline protest events [that] may perhaps be distinguished as active involvement in the online build up—in terms of mobilization—ahead of a physical protest event” (p. 155). Digital prefigurative participation thus denotes online support for a physical event as an indicative estimate of physical participation.

Mercea (2012) suggests, however, that digital support on social media “amplifies it [an offline protest event] even though the people who support a protest on Facebook do not attend it when it happens at a physical location” (p. 164). Support for the digital event may very well create exposure and enjoy social transmission without necessarily mobilizing physical participators. Hence, when dealing with the digital and physical cross-over, the absence of proportional equivalence between the digital and the physical spheres may lead otherwise reliable sources of traditional media astray: Kongens Nytorv, the public square, was near empty on the day of the event in comparison to the virtual promises, but also in comparison to the media’s stories (see Figure 6). The media narratives had not only reported digital acts of supportive clicking in virtual reality but the very reporting of virtual actions on social media also instantiated real-time nonvirtual attention through print and televised media. What began as a virtual phenomenon now flourished outside its virtual anchor. As such, the digital prefiguration of participation was adopted by, and prolonged in, traditional media.

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Figure 6.

Idealized. The virtual reality of a Facebook event that escalates, gains media attention, and thus obtains real-time, nonvirtual presence in shared, common reality. The virtual support was massive with 910 attending, over 2000 interested, and 3400 invited on Facebook. However, only six (or four, the actual number varies across media) vases were smashed for real ⁶ (Illustration: Studio Fountainhead).

Pluralistic ignorance

How could public and press be so collectively misinformed? One way to look at it is from the vantage point of pluralistic ignorance: the change from knowledge to mistaken belief, from commonly shared solid true information to pluralistic ignorance, relies in no small measure on the social proof (Cialdini, 2007) at the agential nodes in the network. ⁷ Pluralistic ignorance is precipitated by faulty belief configurations such that the single agent thinks that p is not the case and at the same time mistakenly believes that all, or the majority of, other agents think p is the case. What may seem to be common knowledge of p turns into pluralistic ignorance of p as the individual agents believe not-p is the case.

Individually, agents register their discontent and sign up for the smashing participation. Signing up does not entail showing up on an individual basis. At the same time, every signatory may believe that everyone else (or the majority) who registered his or her discontent will in fact attend. Individually, then, they consider themselves the odd one out and fallaciously think that everyone else is in as both signatories and participators. Thus, everyone may collectively subscribe to a norm (or convention) of showing up even if everyone, or almost everyone, refrains individually. This goes for each one of the parties involved, and thus for all. In the end, “not showing up” may be true for all although the signal that everybody receives is “show.” Here is the very coordination problem that pluralistic ignorance occasions, and the faulty signal was picked up by public and press and thrown into circulation.

Attempting to explain the Kähler case with pluralistic ignorance as the culprit runs accordingly: everyone thought that everyone believed the smashing event was going to happen not only because the news media ran conjectural evidence for this belief but also because the available digital social proofs were quite convincing in terms of accessibility and overview: everyone could obtain the same social proof through digital media by reading about the event and by observing the ever-growing number of attendances online. Everyone thus had reason (although faulty reason) to believe that the smashing event would take place because everyone could see that everyone else had flagged their interest or hit the attendance button while everyone also could interact with the Facebook event themselves.

This configuration of collective belief does not, however, make the smashing event take place, because there is no component in the system (nor in the public signal) that ascertains proper equivalence between apparent collective belief of anticipation and the event object itself. Truth and common knowledge are replaced by falsity and incorrect beliefs about others’ beliefs independent of private beliefs. Still, the narrative believed in and extrapolated by media’s transmission throughout was robust. As the robustness was tailored with stitches of public narratives, it of course appeared very real. ⁸ As the media extrapolated the interest in the event to their news sites, they thus prolonged pluralistic ignorance to a macro-level in the public sphere. In this way, the epistemic evaluation of the meso-level of agenda-setting is analytically and chronologically prior to the media even though the agendas, which are set, do forcefully rely on media attention.

The media, narratives, and informational pathologies

If the media has a role to play in the “attentive public” (cf. Almond, 1956) as a safeguarding and self-organizing critical organism between citizens and the legislatures—or the informal and formal public spheres—then, as a medium, the information the media processes should not simply be passed on. It should be examined with some epistemic standards higher than the ones inherent in information, belief, and immediate opinion evaluation. Following Parkinson (2012), the role of the attentive publics is to make “actors in the formal public sphere aware of narratives and claims circulating in the informal public sphere, and vice versa” (p. 37). The attentive publics thus inform both the formal and informal publics and function as informational valves. As such, this function “is not simply a matter of neutral communication. It involves selection, interpretation, in other words decisions about the salience of issues, and the importance of information” (Almond, 1956: 374).

Moreover, Parkinson (2012) claims that “what precedes all the formal steps of decision-making is the generation of narratives in the informal public sphere” (p. 29). Informational pathologies, which are apt to amplify fallacious narratives in a systematized manner, take up valuable space both in formal and informal decision-making environments. Not only do they take up space but they prolong and may nourish ill-(in)formed decision-making, given polarization effects, echo-chambering, and other informational dynamics. The influence of narration in publics of crowds—whatever the nature of the specific public may be—seems to complement the account of the influence of information-fed social proof.

In order to specify a strategy for handling these informational phenomena, contrast it with another diagnostic concept which could be claimed to be a group pathology, namely “slacktivism”: the digital engagement (and thus widely considered to involve a minimal amount of effort) in a politically charged cause in a social media setting with either no or negative impact (e.g. Morozov, 2009). Slacktivism may indeed also be a viable explanation of the Kähler case as a competitor to the possible explanation relying on pluralistic ignorance.

Although the concept of slacktivism is generally considered detrimental to traditional activist engagements, the nature of slacktivism and its actual impact are disputed. The main cause of slacktivism may nonetheless be identified in three ways: as a detachment from formal politics where the Internet simply works as an outlet for emotional frustration with no activist aspiration to political change, as a rerouting of political activity from the physical activist space to the digital space depleting the latter, or as a problem of believing political change to come about from Internet activism (see Christensen, 2011, 2012: 3ff).

Accusations of slacktivism focus on the impact on political systems by civic engagements using digital means. It is, however, unclear whether an inefficacious but zealous Internet activist may be miscategorized as a “slacktivist” whenever he or she is not successful in attaining the envisioned impact. Furthermore, the cause of slacktivism—if occurring—might be a spillover effect from prevalent social, cultural, or even political features of traditional activist life: the assumption that an activist on the square is more sincere or efficient in attaining her goals than in the digital arena where network outreach is greater seems an unfit assumption in need of revision. This feeds into the recognition of nondigital slacktivist behavior in terms of bumper stickers, T-shirts, or wristbands eliciting some sort of public signal to others (Skoric, 2012: 79f). However, such signals could be both efficacious and inefficacious forms of a compounded activist action.

Instead of focusing on slacktivism as a diagnostic concept, there is supplementary strategy to suggest, that is, assessing [A] and trying to detect whether [B] have been part of an informational pathology For example, ascertaining whether the relation between citizens, the attentive public, and the formal political system is nourished by specific collective belief configurations in a systemic manner. In trying to assess the possible agenda-setting merits and faults of Internet activism, one may look at the networks and their epistemic or doxastic features. In analyzing the potential for creating public signals to influence political agendas or spur networks of polarization or pluralistic ignorance, one could carve out the informational workings of activist networks—slacktivist or not. One may thus obtain a systematic sense of the success of Internet activist aspiration to politically empower those who actually are detached, estranged, or whatever from the political, social, or economic systems in which they reside.

Interest bubbles

The proliferation of the virtual setting into traditional media—creating stories on their own, for example, interviews with the initiator of the event, reporting the volume of support, discussing the issue at hand with experts—installed in the public the idea of an event with robust popularity and, presumably, monumental attendance to smash vases.

What happened, to speculate slightly, was an exorbitant inflation of interest in the event through digital social media indicating that an interest bubble was emerging. “Bubbles,” a concept borrowed from economics, are usually associated with situations in which assets trade at prices far outstripping their fundamental (Vogel, 2010; Hendricks 2016). In the current case, the so-called fundamental value is the event, which was anticipated to take place—not the anticipation adhering to the event. The asset to be invested in was the “revolt against cultural materialism” (which the event seemed to be a symbolic manifestation of). ⁹ It is an easy asset to invest in: cultural materialism as a predicate of superficiality is undesirable almost by definition. In effect, everyone wants to show that they are not superficial, and hence they support or endorse, “buy” or “trade” this social asset. Furthermore, the trading environment is made bubble-hospitable (Hendricks and Hansen, 2016) with liquid means of opinion investments through clicking “interested” or “attending” in virtual reality.

It was nearly cost-free due to another sociopsychological factor to be taken into account when it comes to bubble formation: digitalization as an event medium. Assuming pluralistic ignorance as a possible explanation, then, as everyone believed that everyone was going to attend the event, no one actually needed to go because the digital flagging of interest was sufficient for the asset to be traded, and thus the market of “attendance”-investment remained liquid, creating an interest bubble. Attending the event was much more costly than the virtual portrayal of going (i.e. clicking), and the last option, the digital click, was thus much more effective and cheaper compared to its physical counterpart’s ineffectiveness and transaction costs (i.e. the cost of physically going in comparison to manifesting a virtual promise of attendance).

On a societal level, media outlets are potential resourceful platforms for the publics of crowds—as such media is a “crucial part of the new topology of politics” (Hajer, 2009: 40)—which nonetheless remain nonresourceful if they are subject to information control problems. A lot of attention is allocated to the dramaturgy of media, politics, and governance (e.g. Hajer, 2005, 2009; Whitehead, 1999), but dramaturgical conceptualizations might unintentionally leave the theoretical impression of staged and controlled narratives. Although many public understandings of political reality are spun off of media-generated narratives, these are often articulated and formed on platforms subject to say pluralistic ignorance, cascade effects, and bandwagons (Hendricks and Hansen, 2016). As such, these group-related belief states on social media leverage nonstaged, nonplanned, and nonreflective—yet sometimes cognitively systemic—patterns in the public sphere. Mansbridge (1999) puts it this way: the deliberative system is full of “everyday talk” which “is not always self-conscious, reflective, or considered” (p. 211). This may lead to informational pathologies, systematizing specific configurations of collective attitudes.

Again, Rauchfleisch and Kovic (2016: 12) argue that agenda-setting is where the transformative potential of the Internet resides. Although indeed true, agenda-setting may be complemented by an analysis of the information networks, collective attitudinal outcomes, and prevailing narratives within the very agenda set in order to assess transformative potentials. Any analysis of the Internet’s transformative potential should, at least, be concerned with the epistemic and doxastic conditions upon which agendas are set. Indeed, the chaotic and muddled nature of mass signals in the public spheres of the Internet may create informational pathologies.

Now, pluralistic ignorance prevails when we believe something just because we find it reasonable that the beliefs of others are probably better informed than our own even though they are not—and as everyone believes this, nobody questions matters of fact, whatever they might be. Detecting purposes and outcomes of belief systems—and not only their ability to influence societal agendas—implies identifying patterns of pluralistic ignorance as well as common knowledge. The qualitative scrutiny of belief flows, based upon information analysis, hints at mapping conditions for group-related action. Environments that are hospitable to bubble formation seem indeed relevant for the setting of agendas. Understanding transverse public signals by studying, mapping, and detecting information control problems may thus expose important nuts and bolts of public spheres.