«The author defines infoxication as a term derived from the union between information and intoxication, and alludes to the difficulty involved in understanding reality in the face of the enormous amount of information, data and stimuli released by the 21st century media.»

By Hugo Burel

April 18, 2023.

Reading the disturbing book by Cristina Martín Jiménez The truth of the pandemic: who has it been and why (mr/Planeta, 2020) referring to the title and other critical and current issues, I discover the concept of «Infoxication » , which seems to me a perfect noun to define the reality of a good part of the current journalistic information, especially that generated by the large media conglomerates. According to the book, the information in the world is in the hands of a few powerful media groups that manage the flow of news and with that condition the information agenda.

The author defines infoxication as a term derived from the union between information and intoxication, and alludes to the difficulty involved in understanding reality in the face of the enormous amount of information, data and stimuli released by the 21st century media.

This had already been pointed out more than 30 years ago by the French thinker Jean Baudrillard in his book The Gulf War has not taken place, in which, without denying that event, he presents it as an informative creation about a real event where biased information conditioned the war truth. His point of view was that the war had not been such, because the superiority of the United States  —leading a coalition of 34 countries— was so great that the confrontation with Iraq could not be defined as a war. But in addition, in this reflection, Baudrillard also considered the origin of the information, almost not generated by the Iraqis.

Around the same time, Gilles Lipovetsky, a French sociologist who reflected on the postmodern condition, noticed that the excess of information that people received ended up saturating consciences and generating an effect of distancing, of indifference as a result of the news, turned into a spectacle, they lost hierarchy among themselves and devalued each other.

Going back to Cristina Martín’s concept, infoxication develops the effect of hibernation -isolation- in the recipient of the messages. According to Ramón Reig, professor of Information Structure at the University of Seville “This effect is produced, among other causes, when a brain —the less cultured, the more prone to the hibernation effect— receives a large amount of information per day, which is called hyperinformation. Then, the reaction of the subject is non-reaction, that is, the hibernation of his action and his thought.

Nothing new, as I have just demonstrated through the cited French authors. However , the evolution and empire of electronic media, the immediacy of networks and the possibility of seeing everything that happens live and direct creates the paradox that the more information is released, the less is reported.

Although in the book cited at the beginning, the reflection begins on the pandemic, then extends to other scenarios, with some final ideas with which I do not agree. But what I take away from reading it is the idea of a saturation of information that, far from adding understanding, contributes to generating uncertainty or, in a more dangerous state, to provoke unanimity and compliance, even in societies that are not under totalitarian regimes.

What was achieved with the pandemic is a clear example: suddenly millions of people around the world were confined to their homes, the streets emptied and the majority allowed themselves to be won over by fear. That generated an economic crisis and an almost planetary quarantine, from which luckily here, in Uruguay, we got rid of.

It is true that Covid-19 was and is real, but let us recognize that at the beginning of the epidemic, the contradictory and reluctant messages of the WHO, added to the lack of foresight and contingency plans in the central countries, contributed to the amplification of this fear because of the flood of information that was received. However, the important questions are: How and where did the virus originate? Was it by accident or a deliberate leak in the Wuhan lab? Is China responsible? Why did Bill Gates anticipate the pandemic in 2015? Why did Gates himself participate in an event in November 2019 that simulated what was happening in reality just a month later? None of them have an answer yet.

Today, do we know more about the Covid-19? Although science knows more, people know less, because the information abounds but does not clarify only achieves the «hibernation» of the minds. If you want people not to be informed, keep it entertained. This recipe never fails, because if the information is also turned into a show, the crossing is infallible to obtain a good infoxication. The numbers of infected and dead went from being something shocking to being incorporated by television newspapers as one more piece of information, such as the weather or the currency price. Today, the pandemic seems to have lessened its threat, although no one has yet ensured its control or disappearance. Yes, there is talk, even here, of an endemic presence of the virus, while the ubiquitous Bill Gates predicts more pandemics. That is, more vaccination, fear and control, according to Cristina Martín.

What the cited book does not include (because of its publication date) is the effect achieved by the vaccines. Currently the number of vaccinated in the world has just reached 70% with a single dose. In Latin America, Asia and the Pacific, 83% of the population has at least one dose administered. Taking into account that four have already been applied in Uruguay, the disproportion between the importance of the vaccine and access to it is evident. However, the almost absence of monitoring and information on the pandemic —perhaps replaced by the war in Ukraine that began a year ago— gives the impression that the issue is no longer important or has been hidden for reasons that are not very clear.

With this and other topics, the excess of information —or its absence— does not mean transparency. It all depends on the source, the interest of the sender, the degree of culture or attention of the recipient and the impact on his life of this or that topic. Without a doubt, it is the large audiovisual and electronic media, added to the networks, the things that fuel the infoxication that we are experiencing. More than that, they impose the story of the time and this obeys to interests that are never made explicit.