Information and Power

How have people been using information to gain power over history? What has changed in the last decades with the digital revolution? The book Information and Power: Popular and Personal Storytelling in the Digital Age explores these questions and offers a simple answer - we have always been telling powerful stories. The secret of powerful stories, the book argues, is in the balance between popular and personal elements.

Between popular and personal storytelling

Popular elements have the power to unite people together. Capitalism, for example, is a powerful story about the importance of producing and consuming goods and services. In this story, people are encouraged to earn more money, which can help them to buy everything - from food, to beauty, happiness, friends and even love. We tell each other the capitalist story every time we post our holiday picture on social media. Advertisers tell us the story of capitalism as they try to convince us to buy more products. Executives tell the capitalist story to their employees as they motivate them to work harder. 

But powerful stories must also include personal elements. Personal elements allow us to understand the relevance of popular stories to our own life. They help us to find our unique role and establish our identity, which makes our life more meaningful. In the story of capitalism we define ourselves based on what we consume and produce: our clothes, culinary preferences, holidays, smartphone, information habits, and occupation. The story of capitalism strives thanks to the balance between popular and personal elements.

Democracy is another powerful story that combines popular and personal elements. It leans on the will of the majority (popular) but tolerates the freedom of each individual (personal). For many years stable democracies enjoyed a balance between conservative popular elements such as nationalism, common history and culture, and liberal personal elements such as freedom and diversity. Yet, the balance between the two has shifted as a pendulum over history. In Europe towards the mid-20th century, the story of nationalism gained power (popular element), while after WWII liberalism was more prevalent (personal element). The idea of a European Union started to materialize with the motto "united in diversity". This motto contains the two elements of a powerful story: united (the popular) and diversity (the personal). In the last decades many European countries have loosened their immigration policies to practice the personal element of diversity. But how did they practice the popular element of union? Is the EU mainly about a free market? Does it have to borrow the popular element from the capitalist story? The lack of a popular element to unite Europe triggered a growing need. Brexit, the rise of populist leaders, and nationalism are all counter reactions for this imbalance. When personal elements become too dominant, people find no common ground, and naturally look for stories with popular elements to reunite and strengthen their group identity.

The need for balance 

Successful leaders, whether company executives or politicians are usually also excellent story tellers. They manage to convince us to follow their ideas by emphasizing their benefits to the group as well as to each individual. Consciously or not, they understand the benefits of popular and personal elements. When looking at the mission statement of one of the most powerful companies today, Google, we see that it incorporates the popular and personal elements: “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful”. While "world's information" and "universally accessible" reflect the popular aspect, the words "organize" and "useful" reflect its personal aspect.

When popular elements of a story become too dominant, there is less room for self-expression, and it is more difficult for us to find our unique role within the story. Eventually, stories with only popular elements produce homogeneity. We all become similar to each other and lose the connection to our real selves. This is exactly the problem that we face today with the story of capitalism. Let us look at Google Images results for the search term "beauty". There is a saying that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. Beauty is very personal. Each one of us has our own sense of beauty. Yet Google's PageRank algorithm shows us almost only images of white young females. The algorithm reflects well the capitalist story, which aims to increase the economic power of competing stakeholders, but mainly of the platform itself. The most popular links to the word "beauty" in almost all languages are commercial websites, where users can purchase beauty products. Think of our children who instead of encyclopedias gain their knowledge through online searches and social media. Eventually we learn that beauty is not in the eyes of the beholder. Beauty is very homogeneous, and it is in the eyes of the powerful producers of the beauty industry.

The problem with the capitalist story is that it has dominated all other domains, the cultural and political spheres, flattening everything to one dimensional commodities. The popular and the personal elements deal exclusively with what we should purchase next. We can either buy what our friends have (the popular element) or something that will make us unique (the personal element). All the great variety of our shared social and cultural values that we cherished throughout human history are reduced in digital platforms to commercial value. Everything can be purchased. Can the accumulation of wealth be the only common goal of our society today? How can we build communities without other types of shared values? The capitalist story does not really provide us with a meaningful popular element.

Similarly, our personal identity is defined solely by the things we purchase. Our needs have been entirely commodified. The information we generate has become the product itself and our main role within the capitalist story is to produce and consume. To express our personal story we are encouraged to be authentic. But instead of being real, we often pretend to be authentic. Many influencers succeed by being perceived as authentic. But they end up making their authenticity a brand, which helps them earn more money and increase the traffic and wealth of the platforms. 

Our real personal stories are much richer and deeper than that. They include our personality traits, knowledge, talents, social skills, dreams and social values. But all of these are reduced to information that we produce in mediated communication via various online platforms. All the richness of our self is now defined by commercial values. We are what we buy. In this way, the story of capitalism does not really provide us with meaningful personal elements either.

The emergence of artificial intelligence took the story of capitalism a step further. Machines are trained based on the information we generate and produce an even more homogeneous popular story, which is a result of our accumulated information production. At the same time, the more we use AI tools the more they learn about us and our personal information habits. AI tools are increasingly writing our emails and social media interactions, helping us to express our needs and desires better than us. In an AI dominated world, the popular and personal elements of the stories are generated completely automatically, and we have much less room to decide autonomously. If AI tools are designed by global corporations they would only exacerbate the hollow of capitalist story.

What can we do to belong again? 

This is indeed a great challenge. Two critical values—modesty and trust—have unfortunately become rare in our times, and we desperately need to revive in order to heal our society. These values are the key for developing more meaningful personal and popular stories. Modesty is the secret ingredient that is missing in order to achieve meaningful personal stories. When we interact with others on social media platforms, we are often tempted to forget our modesty and honesty. Buying a new shirt, trying a new restaurant, or traveling to the hottest destination are not always our truly own authentic needs. But they surely fuel the capitalism engine. As a result, personalization today is not really personalization in its fullest sense. It is merely commercial personalization, driving us to be one-dimensional people. Meaningful personalization should include different personal, social, cultural, political, and economic layers. Many of these layers are not supposed to be commercial or commodifiable. 

We should not forget that the personal elements of a story are always defined in relation to the popular ones. Personal elements emerge through our interactions with other people, helping them, and building a community together. It is about our unique social role in the popular story. As we constantly worship ourselves, we forget about others. Self-centered individualism and excessive consumption are the main reasons for the growing economic and social inequalities that constantly erode our social fabric and break our communities. Modesty is about listening not only talking, cooperating not only competing, and saving not only spending. Modesty is a virtue that helps us to maintain a good balance between ourselves and others.

While modesty helps us to build trust, trust is the secret ingredient that is missing in order to achieve meaningful popular stories. Popular stories often feature popular heroes. We need more trustable role models to follow. The problem is that most of our powerful leaders turn out to be individualists, who pursue their own interests. They are certainly not modest. The crisis of democracy and the ongoing recession in many capitalist countries is a direct result of our inability to trust each other and our leaders. More generally, we are not entirely sure if we should keep on “buying” the capitalist story anymore. The capitalist story is not effective as it used to be in uniting us for a common cause and in identifying our unique role within it.

In order to gain back this trust, we should rebuild our communities around meaningful stories. This requires first that we promote a healthier, more respectful, reliable and less toxic information environment. A tremendous responsibility lies on the shoulders of the more powerful actors: companies, politicians, journalists, and social media influencers. These powerful actors should serve as positive role models by living modest life and promoting social trust. To achieve this, we should incorporate those values in the education system, regulations, organization culture, and algorithms design.

Other core social values that we should promote are reliability, truth, mutual respect, and diligence. These are all values that support stable and healthy communities. Universities and institutes that train students of journalism, political science, and management should stress those values and the responsibility of future leaders to disseminate positive information and promote trust among people. News and political debates should not be dominated by negativity and sensationalism. We can encourage the production and spread of positive news and political discourse that is more respectful and kind.

To conclude, the main idea developed in the book is that a good story–the one that encourages cooperation and social stability–must encompass meaningful popular and personal elements together. It should allow us to be part of a larger group through a common popular idea, but at the same time fulfill our true personal needs and roles. Reviving modesty and trust, two crucial values that are unfortunately becoming rare in our society, can help us to achieve this goal.

Reference

Segev, E. (2025). Information and Power: Popular and Personal Storytelling in the Digital Age. New York: Routledge.