A couple of decades ago, we all witnessed the advent of the Information Age against the background of overwhelming frenzy about the opening of a new era in the life of our planet. Unprecedented access to knowledge, openness, and global connection was celebrated by an overly excited world. The promise of that unbelievable Age was enormous—the internet symbolized freedom of information and opportunity. For us, the astounded dwellers of Sakartvelo, it meant escaping decades of censorship and controlled narratives, gaining access to uncensored history, ideas, and global perspectives, and a chance for a small nation to have a voice in the world. Most importantly, information felt empowering, not exhausting.
And behold, just one score of years was enough for us to find ourselves in the middle of the Misinformation Age, where truth is harder to identify, volume replaces accuracy, and technology can imitate reality itself. All of a sudden, anyone can publish anything instantaneously, spreading truth and lies equally fast; social media rewards emotion and outrage; the famous British adage that “the facts are sacred and the comments are free” is no longer true; artificial intelligence can now create fake images, voices, and videos and rewrite history convincingly, producing all kinds of experts and creating narratives of any form and content that do not actually exist. We have stopped asking, “Can I find this?” Instead, we are posing the question, “Is this real?”
Why does this appear to be particularly pertinent for us, the Georgians? Because we understand perfectly well how much power and what kind of connotation propaganda possesses. We have lived through many bitter years of it. We know exactly what it means when truth is manipulated for power, narratives are weaponized, and society is divided by manufactured stories. The danger today is more subtle—control does not come from quiet, but from clamor; fabrications do not ban truth, they simply choke it. As a consequence, new challenges are coming forth: we are no longer fighting for access to information; we are struggling to discern between what is true and what might be fake.
How can we get out of this truly complex and awfully awkward situation? Could strong and practicable education help? It might. Let us say that powerful modern education must include critical thinking, media literacy, understanding social forces, assuming platform responsibility, thorough analysis of what sort of information we are dealing with, the discipline to pause before believing or sharing, and, of course, the ability to tell truth from lie. Too much, isn’t it? One lifetime might not be enough to keep up this kind of way of living and thinking.
And here is the dilemma—could a primitive way of life, devoid of information and the gadgets thereof, be more pleasurable and rational? Who knows! A brief meditation on our own national perspective on truth might not hurt: Georgian indigenous culture values wisdom passed through generations; it appreciates oral tradition and endured experience; it praises faith, conscience, and personal responsibility; and it believes that technology should support human judgment, not replace it.
I would close these thoughts in a way that might fit rationally and compactly, without hurting anybody’s feelings or bothering anybody’s conscience: the Information Age, branded by the explosion of available data via the internet, personal computers, and mobile devices, taught us how to access information, while the Misinformation Age, with its sheer bulk of false, misleading, and fabricated content, demands that we learn how to recognize truth. Conclusively, the future belongs not to those who know the most, but to those who can tell the difference. The shift from the Information Age to the Misinformation Age means a changeover from simple admission to immense data to a realm infested with false information cooked up by social media and AI-generated content, all triggered by mammonish motives, making it uncannily tough to distinguish truth from lie, even challenging democratic stability, pursued by humankind for centuries and now becoming sucked into the quagmire of contemporary contaminated online content.
The Information Age promised knowledge, whereas the current Misinformation Age flourishes on pathological, emotionally overcharged fictions, conducive to real-world repercussions for our health, national and international politics, and general social cohesion. Meanwhile, one needs to be versed in the drivers of the Misinformation Age, including technology, economics, politics, and social factors, which may save us from impacts such as erosion of trust and cognitive overload. How are we to navigate this new problematic era? Nothing will help except the above-mentioned. Take it as a recommendation if you wish, my good Georgians!
Blog by Nugzar B. Ruhadze
