Wait -- maybe we need to know less?

The last entry talked about needing to know more; this one considers the possibility that we need to know less.

It's prompted by a pair of entries from Nicholas Carr's "Rough Type" blog: his 6 March 2011 entry entitled "Distractions and decisions" and his 7 March 2011 entry entitled Situational overload and ambient overload".

Where "Americans need to know more" focused on the problem of getting good information into our hands, Carr's pieces talk about the problems attendant on what is perceived to be too much information. "Distractions and decisions" linked to a Newsweek article surveying the growing body of research on "decision science" and its surprising revelation that a surfeit of information can lead human beings to be unable to make a decision, or even to make a poor one. Too much information overwhelms our decision-making center, and if a decision is required anyway, our brains are often bad at assigning discrete pieces of information their proper weights, i.e., determining which bits of data are more important than others.

"Situational overload and ambient overload" attempts to divide "information overload" into two categories. Situational overload is Carr's term for "the needle-in-the-haystack problem" of finding the right nugget of data in a vast collection; this is a problem we know how to solve and generally have done a decent job of solving (even if we don't think as highly of search engines as we once did). Ambient overload, on the other hand, is what most of us experience today if our lives at all partake of the ultimate information firehose, the Internet: we are inundated by innumerable nuggets of information we find interesting. (Carr's two pieces languished in my browser for two weeks due to ambient overload.)

Ambient overload cannot be addressed by better filters: in fact, Carr argues that better filters make the problem worse.

As today's filters improve, they expand the information we feel compelled to take notice of. Yes, they winnow out the uninteresting stuff (imperfectly), but they deliver a vastly greater supply of interesting stuff. And precisely because the information is of interest to us, we feel pressure to attend to it. As a result, our sense of overload increases.

So we come back to the problem of Americans who aren't getting good information and therefore aren't making good, sound policies to address the myriad problems we face. It seems clear to me that Americans in general are absorbing enormous amounts of irrelevant or bad data, delivered by television, radio, and the Internet. This would seem to be a clear case of situational overload, except that the information we're absorbing is virtually all information for which we've asked. Our filters are set to let crap through, and we're perfectly happy with that. Whether it's celebrity gossip or trashy TV shows or packaged political information calculated to reinforce our existing biases, we're wallowing in it by choice.

When we do need or want good information about a problem our country faces, we're ill-equipped to evaluate the worth of the information we obtain. I can't think of a single issue, after all, on which you can't find articulate, compelling commentary and plausible-sounding data to back it up. When we look for objective sources of information, we find it side-by-side with its critics' loud proclamations of the source's bias.

So it's not just that we need better information: we need to be able to trust, or to discern, that what we're getting is better information. And then we need to make sure we're not getting too much of it, or we'll be no better off.

Whoosh. Have I made the problem hard enough?