Purposeful Information Voids: PR’s “Dark Matter” / “Dark Energy”

By @marybethwest

Growing up having an uncle in my family who is a university professor emeritus of physics, I've heard a lot of science analogies for issues in everyday life, during visits around the family dinner table, since childhood.

Among my Uncle Joe’s favorite quotes by a favorite physicist, Einstein:

“Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.”

To this point, I must raise a not-so-small matter about an epically important one in my own line of work, public relations, and it’s this:

As an industry, we’re not doing enough to alleviate one of the most avoidable causes of misinformation: purposeful information voids.

I’ve seen this tactic play out so many times in recent years, that I feel compelled to speak up about it.

Companies, politicians, government agencies, not-for-profits, a certain PR member association based in New York City... any of them that avoid-and-deflect instead of answering valid stakeholder questions inherently create information voids.

Information voids never remain voids for long, however.

They're always filled by... something, from someone, somewhere.

And never is the void filled with anything that reflects well on the entity that spurred the void in the first place.

That's where "misinformation" so often begins. Yet it never would have occurred, had the originating entity simply coughed up the truth, in a timely manner.

Being my uncle’s niece, I’m going to adopt a physics metaphor for what I’m talking about here:

Information voids are the “dark matter” of misinformation.

And purposeful perpetuation of these voids is the “dark energy” that fuels them, when clearly there is public appetite for inquiry, explanation, and resolution to unanswered questions.

As defined in physics, “dark matter” is material in the cosmos that – according to the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) – “cannot be detected” and “cannot be seen directly”… which also seems to describe quite perfectly the nebulous, amorphous, covert nature of information voids.

“Dark energy,” by contrast, is the largely unknown force in the universe that causes the expansion of everything else, described by space.com as the “evil counterpart” to gravity… that counterforce which we all know is stabilizing for life here on Planet Earth.

Public relations practitioners who create and sustain purposeful information voids arguably engage in an “evil counterpart” to PR’s ethical use as a force for stabilizing information flow / exchange and the satisfaction of human inquiry about any issue germane to public interest and service.

There has been a great deal of well-intentioned discussion in the PR industry about fighting misinformation and even its more “evil” cousins, disinformation and mal-information... which, by definition, each feature intensifying intents to deceive.

Many folks out there keep persistently scratching their heads about the ubiquitous role of technology and emerging AI functionality – and pointing the finger of accusation there as the alpha-and-omega of our biggest PR information-management problems.

Yes, these issues are important and complex, but hey:

If we in PR aren’t even going to do the easy stuff – of identifying and addressing information voids where we know they clearly exist and simply doing our jobs of generating truthful content and explanations for questions our organizations are persistently asked – then we might as well hang it up on tackling the more complicated stuff.

In truth, a lot of this problem isn’t rocket-science.

Too much of it is simply a matter of either organizational managements trying to skirt accountability with their stakeholders, or, of under-qualified comms folks who simply don’t know what they’re doing. Or maybe a combination of both.

If you and your organization are encountering what you perceive as a misinformation problem harming your brand, then ask yourself:

How much of it persists outside a scope of what you should be able to manage with a purpose campaign of accurate, verifiable information alongside a provable ethic of transparency, versus how much of it is completely self-inflicted?

I’ll take the liberty of modifying that famous aforementioned Einstein quote:

“Whoever is careless with informational accountability in small matters cannot blame others for misinformation in important matters.”

 That's my 15 cents.

Mary Beth West, FPRCA, serves as a senior strategist of Fletcher Marketing PR in Knoxville, Tennessee. (Twitter: @marybethwest)