Drowning in Information: The Famine
“... For the first time, we were sent information which answered no question we had asked, and which, in any case, did not permit the right of reply.”
Why does news "matter"?
In high school, we often asked our teachers the classic question: "When are we ever going to use this?" We'd complained that we would always have a calculator, so why memorize formulas? Looking back, often times we wish we'd spent less time on trigonometry and more on (seriously) filing our taxes or cooking a decent meal. Our complaints weren't just about the quite frankly useless exercises undertaken. If contemplated further, our begrudged acquiescence reached a deeper sense that much of what we learned was disconnected from our actual lives.
Enter the internet.
We love the internet because it provides us instant access to what feels like the whole of human information, all at once. Isn't that wonderful? However, as the adage goes, the "poison is in the dose". Beyond when talking to infamously oversharing cousins are family weddings, is it actually possible to have "too much information"? If so, how would we know? What does having too much information look like?
In his classic 1980s commentary on media, Neil Postman argues that we may have arrived at too much information earlier than many of us would think. When was that? Somewhere around the mid-19th century, with the invention of the telegraph.
He describes how the telegraph, the first near real-time communication at a distance, changed the information landscape:
"... telegraphy made relevance irrelevant. The abundant flow of information had very little or nothing to do with those to whom it was addressed; that is, with any social or intellectual context in which their lives were embedded. Coleridge's famous line about water everywhere without a drop to drink may serve as a metaphor of a decontextualized information environment: In a sea of information, there was very little of it to use."
Early in our education we are indoctrinated with the belief that instant access to information is a godsend. The internet is the miracle of the 21st century! Is it any wonder, then, that questioning that conclusion seems a little moot? While the creation and utilization of the internet has altered the course of humanity, the reality of the benefits and drawbacks surrounding "instant access to limitless information" are more complicated. Postman points, made in the 1980s, about the "decontextualized information environment" have only grown more relevant as the information age progressed.
After taking in our morning news, either from our favorite pundits on instagram, feeds of our choice, or our first dopamine hits on tiktok, how much of the information we just consumed actually ends up up altering the course of our day? Did we gain some insight into a problem we are solving at work? Or perhaps an actionable way to improve our relationships? One source of information is a clear gimmee; the weather. Obviously useful. Beyond that however, the information presented to us was likely largely irrelevant.
Postman goes on:
"... most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action. For the first time in human history, people [are] faced with the problem of information glut, which means that simultaneously [we are] faced with the problem of a diminished social and political potency."
"You may get a sense of what this means by asking yourself another series of questions: What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIO, affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha'is in Iran? I shall take the liberty of answering for you: you plan to do nothing about them. You may, of course, cast a ballot for someone who claims to have some plans, as well as the power to act. But this you can do only once every two or four years by giving one hour of your time, hardly a satisfying means of expressing the broad range of opinions you hold...
"Thus, we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing."
And here we get to the crux of the matter; instant access to all the world's information has lead us to information glut, effectively the mental equivalent of obesity. We have access to cheap, delicious calories at a moment's notice, but almost none of the abundant food is nutritious. Likewise we have instant access to all the information we could ever want; stimulating, riviting, utterly entertaining. The vast majority of all that abundant information we regularly access is also trivial, and effectively useless.
But does it move the needle?
Prior to information age, the things people knew or learned about had a high "proximity to action", meaning the information was relevant, local, and in context to the life of the learner. But now, deep into the information age, we are drowning in a sea of useless information. We are almost constantly being fed news framed in import, yet entirely removed from local context, making it nearly impossible to act upon. This useless information is more devious than it sounds, with strong links between consuming things like social media and the 24 news cycle leading to significant increases in anxiety, depression and diminished individual agency.
Consider your life since the 2020 election. In January 2021, the US capitol was stormed by a riot attempting to prevent the peaceful transition of power to a new US president. In the wake of such significant, important news, what actions did you take differently in the subsequent days, weeks, or months? Any?
Regardless of your particular political sympathies, I suspect you carried out two actions:
- You developed an opinion on the matter (might have even shared it, to the detriment of your relationships).
- You became more anxious than you were before.
And what else? Likely nothing. You went on living your life. You kept eating the same things for lunch, you woke up at the usual time every day, and you continued to go to work. This event was of huge import and precedent to the country, and as such and produced immense amounts of subsequent "news", consuming the attention of millions of individuals for years. Somehow, despite this attention consumed, this landmark moment in recent American history has yet to influence the day-to-day actions of the vast majority of Americans. Well, it has influenced our lives, by making us more anxious, pressuring our opinions in one way or the other, and giving us something politically charged to hate our neighbors about. And still, it consumes our attention.
Consumes. Isn't that an odd way to think about information, consuming our attention? And yet, that is exactly what information does, it consumes our waking lives. As Herbert Simon, Nobel Prize winning psychologist and economist summed:
"[I]n an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it."
We start every day with a fixed amount of attention that we can give to tasks, people, events throughout the day. Our attention is consumed on the information we receive as you spend time with your family (such as the sights, sounds, words, cries, laughter, etc). Our attention is consumed by the labor in front of us (the problems, solutions, context, learning, etc). And, our attention is consumed by the media we are exposed to throughout the day (feeds, news casts, YouTube videos, TikToks, etc).
The Famine
We are used to thinking of the world in terms of "information richness", like having "access to all the world's knowledge", or being in the "information age". That said I find it more provocative and insightful to consider this from the other side of the coin. Due to the enormous amount of information presented to us every day, and how much of our attention that information consumes, we now live in an attention famine.
That may seem like an odd idea, after all we have the "same amount" of attention we always have had, how could we be in a "famine"? Remember, the abundance of one thing creates a scarcity of whatever it consumes. Imagine within your local city that overnight the population grew by 100x. Now, the same resources, housing, food, electricity, and other infrastructure that originally supported a single individual must be stretched to support 100. What resources wouldn't become scarce?
In the same vein, the amount of attention that humans have always had is now being stretched and consumed by orders of magnitude more information. It's often said that a person today is exposed to more information in a single day than someone in the 15th century encountered in their entire lifetime. We cannot manufacture more attention, it is the most finite of all resources we have.
Our attention is scarce due to all the demands of where and how to spend it; TV, texting, social media, etc. Can you feel your finite attention being siphoned away? It is not uncommon these days to spend more than 5 hours a day on social and related media (utterly useless information that cannot be acted on), which easily sums to more than 10 years of constant scrolling throughout a lifetime. Is this how we want to spend our most scarce, finite, and precious resource? We have an urgent and pressing "need to allocate [our] attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that... consume it".
We all have available to us orders of magnitude more information than we could possibly spend our attention on. If we ignore the imperative to choose how to spend our time, the attention merchants (TV networks, Meta, Google, Apple, Netflix, etc) will use their vast resources to find ways to pull us in and harvest our attention for their financial benefit. By the age of 80, do we really want to look back and realize that literally 10 years of our lifes were spent scrolling through trivial memes and rage bait?
This might be a worthy trade-off if the media we consumed helped us improve our lives. For most of us, that’s wishful thinking. As media has become more driven to maximize engagement using intensely manipulative designs, the "return" on our attention investment is largely negative. What do we get in return for all our investment in scrolling? Increased anxiety due to the glut of triviality and rage bait shoved down our throats. Not only that, but an increased dependence on the triviality within media to numb our newly acquired anxiety. We acquire this numbing through highly engineered streams of dopamine hits, all while consuming hours of our attention every day. Hours that we cannot get back.
Here lies the crux of the matter, and the hidden cost of the information age. We are drowning in information that neither informs our actions nor empowers us to take action. We are constantly bombarded by news, entertainment, trivialities, and advertisements, all of which whittle away our attention without any meaningful return to show for it. This glut of useless information consumes our lives without providing us value to improve those lives.
So, what are we to do? We can't turn back the clock on technology, nor should we want to. The information age, for all its faults, remains a massive benefit to humanity. But it would be naive to continue blindly accepting new technologies without scrutinizing their costs. The problem isn't the existence of information; it's our unthinking consumption of it.
The good news is that we have agency. We can choose. To guide those choices, we need a framework for distinguishing between information that drains us and information that empowers us. This is the concept of (surprise) useful information.