Slate magazine recently published a great article about information overload.
It’s nice to see some news outlets are coming around to the idea information overload is part of life, and the human mind has always wrestled with filtering chaos into something manageable.
A jungle full of food and predators and allies and enemies is no less of a deluge of data than an Internet full of blogs and social networks and emails and Tweets.
Getting up in the morning and going through 200 emails while you browse Twitter and check the statuses of your Facebook friends before cleaning out your RSS reader is laborious – but so is waking up to feed the pigs, milk the cow, reap the wheat, dig the outhouse and make sure all the kids have breakfast.
The Slate article points out how soon after the invention of the printing press in the 1440s, intellectuals began to warn the public of the dangers of information overload.
The world at that time suddenly had more books in it than any one person could ever read.
But, our collective fear of new technology overloading our puny brains goes back further than that.
“Worries about information overload are as old as information itself, with each generation reimagining the dangerous impacts of technology on mind and brain. From a historical perspective, what strikes home is not the evolution of these social concerns, but their similarity from one century to the next, to the point where they arrive anew with little having changed except the label.
“These concerns stretch back to the birth of literacy itself. In parallel with modern concerns about children’s overuse of technology, Socrates famously warned against writing because it would “create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories.” He also advised that children can’t distinguish fantasy from reality, so parents should only allow them to hear wholesome allegories and not “improper” tales, lest their development go astray. The Socratic warning has been repeated many times since: The older generation warns against a new technology and bemoans that society is abandoning the “wholesome” media it grew up with, seemingly unaware that this same technology was considered to be harmful when first introduced.”
The article goes on to point out how just about every medium or technology was once criticized by intellectuals of the day as being the ruin of their time – newspapers, books, phonographs, telephones, telegraphs, radios, motion pictures, televisions, cable, cell phones and now, of course, the Internet.
All of these things were once warned against as overwhelming the senses, ruining the attention span, isolating the heart and dumbing down the children.
Today, modern critics warn us about social networks, Google, Twitter and video game with the same ominous predictions.
They are wrong.
Information overload simply doesn’t exist. We have been dealing with the overwhelming amount of information available to us from moment to moment since we first starting keeping up with allies and enemies, locations of food, agriculture and so on.
There has always been more to take in mentally than we could spend our time digesting.
Clay Shirky correctly identified the real problem in a recent talk – filter failure.
Each generation has to learn the same lesson – you can’t keep up with everything. You have to establish filters, and those filters will have to be updated often.
To sum up his ideas, every once in a while the rules of information production change. After mass production made it possible to mass produce books, we became accustomed to filtering at the source. The people who owned the presses chose what got published.
The same rules later applied to TV stations and newspapers, magazines and radio stations.
The person who stood to profit from the media they produced also stood to lose their ass, so they learned to filter what went out into the world. The rules of natural selection weeded out those who did it poorly.
With the Internet, the cost of producing content dropped to almost nothing. Now everyone can produce it, and the filters are no longer at the source. Everyone is a town crier, a journalist, a newspaper, a TV station. Content is pouring in from everywhere. The filters are now within each consumer.
It turns out, Timothy Leary was right when he said power to the people is now power to the pupil. Properly choosing to put in our heads is the new liberty.
David Weinberger said in his lecture “Knowledge at the End of the Information Age” that it was the physical limitations of the book which led to the parsing of data for the last few hundred years.
Books can’t be infinite. They have a beginning and an end. It makes more sense to have books be about specific subjects instead of a mishmash of rants about disparate ideas.
Books also must be republished in new editions to gain updates and go through a long process of creation before eventually reaching the public.
There are many limitations in using the book, but it was the best way to keep our knowledge for over 500 years.
Our systems of categorizing and organizing data naturally followed the patterns which come from aggregating books into collections. Universities followed libraries, and until the Internet changed everything, these patterns of knowledge transmission shaped the flow of information in our lives.
Now we are experiencing a change in how data gets distributed to us, and we have to adjust. The comfort afforded us by allowing filtering to occur at the source, and the manageability which came from static documents like books are both gone.
Even the nature of telegraphs, the mail system and telephones allowed for an easier way to filter incoming data. But with text messages, email and voice mail – the filtering is on our end.
With everyone producing content from every corner of the planet, we must learn how to filter well. Every minute, 22 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube. Right now, there is about 400 years worth of video already uploaded there.
With living documents like Wikipedia and blogs, and the ephemeral shape-shifting outlets like Twitter and Google Buzz – we must learn to be agile.
The thing is, even if we don’t, it doesn’t matter. In 500 years hence, people will have already adapted to current concerns in the way we have with old technology. Their concerns will be the same with whatever they must deal with.
Whenever an engineered system replaces an evolved one, we freak out, and rightly so. Oral history and storytelling evolved over time, books and scrolls swooped in and created an artificial organizational system – an engineered replacement for something we already had an intuitive understanding of.
In other words, some things are just in our blood. We come out of the womb with a brain ready to deal with a variety of information inputs. Systems which take advantage of those instincts work better and are more successful, but they don’t always get it right.
We will always have an intuitive connection to anything our ancestors experienced. Our genes hum in ecstasy when we hear a good story told well. We instantly connect and accept television shows and movies – but those formats have had time to evolve to match our instincts.
As Clay Shirky has pointed out, Facebook is another engineered system which has replaced the old way, for many, of spreading rumors, or inviting people to parties, or sharing intimate information about things like breakups or illness.
Right now, social media is hit and miss, but over time, it will evolve to match our gut expectations. When you use Twitter to tell the world about your job, an evolved system smashes into an engineered one – the results will be messy while we continue to figure out how this system best meshes with our culture.
So, expect chaos for a while, and once we get all this nailed down, expect more.
I’ve decided to start a sister blog, one focused on a single easy to share topic – self delusion. I’ll be writing about it from a scientific perspective, but I’ll try to stay away from too much clinical lingo.
Here’s the address right now: http://youarenotsosmart.wordpress.com/
Here’s the first entry:
The Misperception: You see everything going on before your eyes, taking in all the information like a camera.
The Truth: You are only aware of a small amount of the total information your eyes take in, and even less is processed by your conscious mind and remembered.
Magicians build careers around inattentional blindness.
It takes just a smidgen of misdirection to conceal a change in your visual field. Innattentional blindness is literally looking without seeing. It turns out, your brain isn’t a passive receiver of your eyes. Instead, you actively participate, choosing what to perceive.
Many car accidents are the result of having your eyes wide open, but failing to see the car, the bike, the deer.
You are familiar with focusing attention on sounds. For instance, at a party you can listen to a single person talk while a cacophony of voices and music bounces around the room.
You tune out sounds all the time at work, in a city, watching television, turning down the volume on what you aren’t interested in – but you don’t notice it as much when you do it visually.
You are “blind” to that which you are not attentive.
As events unfold before you, you tend to pay attention to a small cone of information and then, when thinking back on what you saw, you tend to believe you saw more than you did.
Consciousness is all about filling in the gaps. You assume you know what’s happening right outside whatever it is you are focused on, but all over the place, you are imagining the things you can’t see.
So, when you form a memory, and then later recall that memory, anything which wasn’t right in the center of your attention is a fabrication – a dream.
This phenomenon takes a strange turn when you start to consider other ways of becoming blind to things which you can see, even if you are paying attention.
People who have been blind all their lives and then gain sight find it difficult to see the same objects and actions as those who are familiar with sight. They have no frame of reference for their perceptions, and so their conscious mind ignores the unfamiliar information.
This phenomenon can vary from culture to culture. Asian cultures seem to be less susceptible.
Inattentional blindness can also come about from an overload of visual information, all of it considered important, but all of it familiar. Experienced pilots are less likely to see a plane on the runway than pilots who have only landed a handful of times. Experienced lifeguards often miss a body at the bottom of a large, busy pool.
When it comes to seeing everything you’re looking at – you are not so smart.
Click here for More Examples.
When my dad is home, Fox News is on. No amount of reasoning has been able to lessen his devotion to it.
I often feel like it has stolen him from me.
Endangered are my memories of him from when I was most impressionable, when I was most committed to emulating him. I remember his independence, his revulsion for the media and all those “apple polishers” with bitch tits and cuff links.
He was one of those Vietnam vets who grew up on a farm, raced muscle cars and skinned deer before enlisting. The first time he saw a bumper sticker which read, “Love My Country. Fear my Government” he pointed it out to me and nodded, remaining silent for the rest of the trip. He was always willing to hear out someone who had a new conspiracy theory involving THE MAN fucking everyone over.
Inside, it was mostly science fiction. Isaac Asimov, Larry Niven, Arthur C. Clarke, etc. There was also a good bit of pulp fiction with awful painted covers of naked women being saved by badass men with beards and laser rifles. Aside from this, there were many practical nonfiction books on survival and history and war and homebuilding – the sort of things prosecutors point out after the wind blows over a tarp covering someone’s stash of pipe bombs.
My father would sometimes mention the Bible or God, but he seemed to treat it the same way he did the pyramids and electromagnetism – as a mystery he felt humanity had come to a consensus on too soon. My mom made me go to church, but she never once asked Dad to join us.
After the war, he bounced around the bars of New Orleans like a bird trapped in a house. At family reunions, his cousins would tell me unbelievable stories about brawls and women and “The Mafia.”
He became a reclusive tinkerer and hunter as I grew up. He worked construction and became an electrician, falling back on the training he received in the service.
He was boisterous and outgoing when in public, a talker who would gab about the good old days with the simple people we lived near, but spin out of control with wild ideas and theories about space and time when he was with hackers and college students.
At home, he retreated into his shop to build radios or airplanes or sharpen broadheads. Stacks of Popular Science and Discover and Omni leaned in the corners of the shop he slowly filled. It became a sprawling laboratory where you would not be surprised to see a Jacob’s Ladder sizzling nearby a deep freeze with a year’s supply of deer meat inside. We probably had the first home computer in our city, and he was always taking it apart. (All of that would later be eaten by Hurricane Katrina and spit out into the woods were it lies now, covered in leaves and lizards.)
He once taught me how to use a rifle scope by letting me get a black eye. I was 10.
My uncle, an obviously gay man who has never admitted it to his family, once owned a florist shop. When the man who owned the building began harassing my uncle for being a dirty faggot, my dad went to the shop and smashed the landlord’s head into a wall. He never told anyone about this until after my grandfather died because it would have revealed my uncle’s sexuality.
Looking back, Dad seemed like that guy in the zombie movies who has been waiting all his life for something apocalyptic to visit, something to place in his busy hands, which I think is why he changed so much after 9/11.
He became that guy – the one who put American flags akimbo on the sides of his hood like a visiting dignitary. He had yellow ribbons, real ones, on his front porch. He installed a flag pole in his yard as high as the tree line and has replaced Old Glory at least seven times as the poor-quality Chinese fabric shredded in the wind each March.
He wanted to strangle the hijackers one by one. He wanted to be 20 again so he could enlist. He satiated this desire with multiplayer first-person shooters, the more realistic the better.
He stocked up on ammo and gas and canned food, which would all come in handy a few years later when the aforementioned hurricane would put his skills to use. At first, he kept the TV tuned to CNN; I know this because he started recording it to videotape. He has the towers coming down on VHS.
But, as the ripples started to dissipate, and the news stories became anniversary stories, FOX News moved into his heart. He started watching the pundits as much as the anchors.
While I was in college, he was watching FOX, and when we were in the same room it was like that old Mad Magazine cover from 1969. I was telling him about history and anthropology and sociology and Rupert Murdoch. He was telling me about the nature of man. I argued from books. He argued from experience. We both became convinced the other was brainwashed.
I’ve calmed down since graduating. I avoid the fights.
We still can’t talk about politics; it’s impossible. He parrots FOX News because at this point he depends on it exclusively for all his information about the world. Other sources, he feels, are biased.
His take on the Iraq war was simple. He never cared about bringing democracy to the Middle East. He would tell strangers about how oil is necessary for America to continue to operate the military industrial capitalist complex. Without it, our system will collapse, and if we have to kill a few thousand people to keep the oil from getting nuked – so be it.
He started thinking of other people as civilians who need to be protected from the enemy and themselves. For dad, 9/11 awakened a survival mode which he can’t let go of.
I don’t understand the embrace.
When I was about 13-years-old, my father took me with him to a job site in Alabama near a mine. It was far in the distance, and as they set off charges it created a muffled whomping sound that moved through the earth and passed underneath us at regular intervals. I remember Dad’s screwdriver hovering each time the earth shuddered, and the cords in his forearm rising to the surface as he waited. Just as he returned to the work, the sound would pause him again. After a few more whomps, he closed up the panel of wires and relays and said, “We have to go now.”
Somehow, this televised, esoteric, virtual involvement in the war on terror has allowed him the distance he needed to participate on some level with the ghosts he has kept out of his head. With the regime change here, he can love his country and fear his government.
I’ve come to realize people who watch Fox News do not wish to be informed by it, they wish to have their beliefs confirmed. Fox News says to them, “Your fears are justified.”
So, when people talk about hating Glenn Beck or wishing they could punch Bill O’Reilly, I see their anger as a tiny pea in the bottom of a washpan, and I wonder how many are out there like myself who feel cheated by those who spit when they talk to the camera.
How many of us have been forced by small men to put away the way we used to see someone we love?
Clay Shirky may be the greatest voice of reason right now, that is, if you are among those fascinated by the infocalypse – the biopsychosocialtechnoinfo revolution sweeping through the lives of information merchants like newspapers and their ilk.
He recently gave a talk where he described a world where local news is so strangled for resources it will no longer be able to hold governments and institutions accountable. The public will not be privy to sort of information which keeps people with power from abusing that power.
From his speech:
It is really a shift from one class of institutions to the ecosystem as a whole where I think we have to situate the need of our society for accountability. I also want to distance myself — and I’ll end shortly. But I want to distance myself, with that observation I also want to distance myself from the utopians in my tribe, the web tribe, and even to some degree the optimists.
I think a bad thing is going to happen, right? And it’s amazing to me how much, in a conversation conducted by adults, the possibility that maybe things are just going to get a lot worse for a while does not seem to be something people are taking seriously. But I think this falling into relative corruption of moderate-sized cities and towns — I think that’s baked into the current environment. I don’t think there’s any way we can get out of that kind of thing. So I think we are headed into a long trough of decline in accountability journalism, because the old models are breaking faster than the new models can be put into place.
To use the historical analogy from Eisenstein, from The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, there was a long hundred years between theProtestant Reformation and the Treaty of Westphalia. And that was a hundred years in which people almost literally did not know what to think. The old institutions were visibly not functioning any longer, but the nation-state as a new organizing principle was not yet in place. And those were, for many people, not a great hundred years.
So I have no idea how long this transition will take. But I don’t think that some degree of failure and decay is avoidable. I think our goal should be to minimize the depth of that trough, to constrain that trough to the areas we can constrain it to, and to hasten its end. But I don’t think we can get away with a simple and rapid alternative to what we enjoyed in the 20th century — in part because the accidents that held that landscape together in the 20th century were so crazily contingent.
Wow. That stinks.
It’s a great speech, and you can read the transcript here:
I am a man.
I saw an interview with Daniel Radcliffe the other day, and that’s what he had to say to all those people who still think he’s a cute little wizard.
I too am a man, and apparently it means a number of things.
For some, it means to be one of the last remaining hairy, muscled warrior kings without need for emotions or pity clenching a battle axe in your calloused hands at the ends of your scarred and bleeding forearms barking orders to your brethren as they join in conquest of the enemy in hopes of one day returning to your womenfolk and ravishing them so one day their 15 sons can go on to inherit your glory.
For others, it means being someone who works hard for a living, coming home sweaty on Friday and washing up with Lava before dressing in denim and driving your pickup to the local bar where you’ll spend an evening tossing back beer, making fun of midgets, and discussing just what it is you like more – custom-built V10 racing lawnmowers, or women’s Jello wrestling.
Still, for many it means high-fiving at a college football game and tanking up on cheap brew while slipping nips of Jagermeister between field goals before stumbling back to the frat house turning your visor sideways to better shoot a cell-phone video of some dumb brunette playing truth or dare in her underwear as Chumbawumba jostles the organs in your chest cavity.
Recently, a number of people think it means pausing your game of ”Gears of War 2″ to set the Tivo to record “The Science of Star Trek” and checking the progress of your torrent download of 10,000 photos of Jenna Jameson in action before you head out to the mailbox to collect the shipment from the seller on Ebay who promised you a mint “Sin City” Marv Bobble Head action figure with the rare misspelling on the packaging.
Guess what ladies? You think being a man is sad, depressing and gross.
We know, that’s why we changed and/or hid our manliness for nearly two decades. But then, suddenly it seems, something happened.
Perhaps you’ve noticed it. The backlash against sensitivity and feminine aesthetics over the last few years.
Men, it seems, are tired of being emasculated and are seeking some form of release.
In the dead of night on April 22, 2004, deep in the mine-pocked desert of Afghanistan, a group of United States Army Rangers stood silent around a bonfire.
Like Viking warriors before them, these soldiers were sending off one of their own. They had lit a secret funeral pyre for a man whose wife and family were going about their lives oblivious on the other side of the planet.
We will never know what went through their minds as the blaze licked the air between them. We can imagine the flames illuminated their stoic faces as they avoided eye contact. We can assume they stood with their rifles slung low, shifting their body weight and scratching to spend nervous energy. We can almost see them now, alone out there on the sands with one shared purpose for the night – destroying the evidence.
It wasn’t Pat Tillman’s body in the fire; it was his armor and later his uniform, the result of panic within his unit. Two of his fellow Rangers were wounded, a member of the Afghan militia was dead. The blood of a great football hero, the famous patriot, was on all their hands. But for weeks, only a handful of people would know how and why he was killed.
In the years since his death, The U.S. Department of Defense has closed and reopened the case a number of times and even launched a criminal investigation into Tillman’s death. Tillman’s parent’s believe a cover-up began before the body was cold, and new evidence revealed in spurts over the years points to medical examiners sharing that opinion.
This is a great set of declarations about the Internet and journalism, but also about life and modern culture.
It includes:
5. The Internet is the victory of information.
Due to inadequate technology, media companies, research centers, public institutions and other organizations compiled and classified the world’s information up to now. Today every citizen can set up her own personal news filter while search engines tap into wealths of information of a magnitude never before known. Individuals can now inform themselves better than ever.
After Hurricane Katrina evaporated, after the sun disappeared behind the hills, we ventured out.
We packed into a small car, five of us, and slowly navigated our razed suburban streets until we emerged into the city. A few neighbors with chainsaws had cleared narrow paths while we collected ourselves earlier in the day.
We moved through Hattiesburg as if diving along a coral reef. There were no lights other than an occasional passing car. Our child-wide eyes would flick to movement or damage as our high beams washed across broken buildings, their roofs peeled back like sardine cans. We pointed; we gasped.
It was like browsing a museum with a magnifying glass, and as we headed back home it was easy to imagine hundreds of bodies strewn across the mall parking lot or upturned cars perched on twisted McDonald’s signs.
We had a sense, after making a few rounds in the city and returning, all of Mississippi must have looked like Hiroshima after the bomb.
Single-topic photo tumble blogs are suddenly everywhere, and popular.
I intended to write a blog entry this weekend about the surfeit of tumble blogs I’ve noticed lately, but apparently it was an idea floating in the collective unconscious because the good people at Slate beat me to it.
So, in lieu of writing it, I’ll just leave some links here:
- Look at this Fucking Hipster
- This Is Why You’re Fat
- Why The Fuck Do You Have a Kid?
- Stuff White People Like
- Pets Who Want to Kill Themselves
- Fail Blog
- Graph Jam
- Lolcats
- It’s Lovely, I’ll Take It
- Awkward Family Photos
- There, I Fixed It
- Owl Tattoos
- Sad Guys on Trading Floors
- Cake Wrecks
- Asleep on the Subway
- Fuck You Penguin
- I Bang the Worst Dudes
- Happiest People Ever
- Lamebook
- Fuck Yeah Skinny Bitch
