I came across this new word via Barry Ritholz’s blog The Big Picture, which I am starting to read regularly. The word comes from a Wired Magazine article by Clive Thompson on How More Info Leads to Less Knowledge. Ritholz summarizes the article in the following definition:
Agnotology: Culturally constructed ignorance, purposefully created by special interest groups working hard to create confusion and suppress the truth.
He uses this to describe how the “disgraced meme” that Fannie and Freddie created the housing mess keeps coming up in the media.
[…] freedom of choice in the people’s acquiescence to oppression. And of course the exercise of agnotology is a means to that end. The power elite works hard to insure that the people, who after all do have […]
[…] finally trump lies cleverly told and sold. I published a piece on the neologism ‘Agnotology,’ a word to describe the purposeful sowing of lies by special interest groups create […]