Off Centre | Why the Russian narrative on MH17 speaks volumes about our web consumption

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Journalists look at debris from the Boeing 777 Malaysia Arilines flight MH17. Photo: EPA

Published: 5:30pm, 5 Mar 2015Updated: 12:15pm, 4 May 2015

Remember the days before smartphones when you could say stuff and chances were people would either believe you or else just kind of shrug their shoulders? Or if they knew you were full of it, they’d have to know what they were talking about in order to prove it, instead of simply pulling the internet out of their backsides and declaring: “See! People in Micronesia DO have sexual organs.” Or “Look – global warming IS / IS NOT happening.”

Sure you do, if you're not irritatingly young. And you'll be aware, too, that this is just one of the ways the internet has changed real-life interactions. But online? Social networks no more regulate veracity than shouting matches or fistfights might have been relied on to do in far-off times. Yes, yes, we're all so terrifically, wonderfully informed now, but who among us can adequately respond to the tide of arbitrary, partial and often conflicting information coiled and ready to surge at us from our unhappy little devices? I sometimes imagine we've become part of the hardware – that bastard thing, “content”, is like the cathode rays in an old TV set and it's our job, most of us, to deflect and share them. Even if nobody's really paying attention.

There’s always some chump who thinks he has all the answers, though, isn’t there? And here's another problem with social media: it gives him – it’s usually a him – a platform. Every newsfeed, every little networked cell, has these sorts. And occasionally you'll think, well, maybe this chap knows a thing or two, and you'll read his “oh ho – well, we knew this all along and they blamed it on somebody else... I wonder why that is,” kind of update, as I did the other day, and think all sorts of things: what did we know?; why didn't I know it?; am I an uninformed halfwit? who are “they”?; and does he really wonder why or does he know and wish to imply we should all of us know?

And so the thing – the post, tweet, whatever – sits there like a jabbing, accusing finger, and before you know it you've clicked on the link he's attached: Evidence Now Conclusive Ukrainian Government Shot Down Malaysian Airlines MH17. And there you're confronted by a lengthy article from November that seems, at a skim, to re-heat a whole lot of hearsay, on a website that it turns out is run by Michel Chossudovsky, a favoured commentator on Russia Today who believes Wall Street and the US military-industrial complex had prior knowledge of everything from the September 11 attacks to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and are intent on establishing a fascistic New World Order. Congratulations – you've stumbled on a world-view in which Barack Obama and the European Union are trying to re-start the cold war, the Kiev government is made up of blood-thirsty neo-fascists intent on ethnic cleansing and the Russian bear, splendid in her isolation, is being goaded.

I grant you the world is far less binary than it used to be: people don't buy that there's the truth and the not-the-truth so much anymore. Rightly so, probably. And this stuff might be a bit out there; but it's also, you know, out , on RT and elsewhere, and a lot of people – gobshite left-wing antiglobalists and gobshite right-wing European nationalists, yes, but others too – are exercising their freedom to believe it. It's in black and white, so if it suits your own disillusioned slant on things why not stick with the narrative? After all, who can gainsay you if they can't be bothered to read the thing properly, or are more interested in the Kardashians than the Russians, or, hell, just don't have the damn time – or let's face it, enough basic knowledge – to refute you.

Ukraine is merely an example. The world has always been and always will be a marketplace and a battleground for ideas and narratives and sometimes baneful ones gain advances. It would be foolish to suppose the internet – the free internet, as opposed to the de facto intranet that exists in places like, well, Russia, China and Iran – to be any kind of ampitheatre in which the truth of things automatically wins out. We may be more copiously and more readily informed, but if any of us think the newsfeeds at our fingertips mean we are more informed about what's going on in the world, we surely deceive ourselves.