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?

Americans need to know more

This Newsweek article, provocatively entitled "How Ignorant are Americans?", is pretty popular on The Browser right now. At first I wasn't inclined to pay it much heed: hand-wringing about American ignorance is its own cottage industry, and has been for decades. However, I finally read it and was mildly encouraged by a bit of research noted at the end of the article:

For years, Stanford communications professor James Fishkin has been conducting experiments in deliberative democracy. The premise is simple: poll citizens on a major issue, blind; then see how their opinions evolve when they’re forced to confront the facts. What Fishkin has found is that while people start out with deep value disagreements over, say, government spending, they tend to agree on rational policy responses once they learn the ins and outs of the budget.

However, that brings us to the problem of what constitutes a trusted source of information. Far too many people mistrust the news media these days, and I'm hard-pressed to argue that they're wrong. I doubt anyone can claim that his or her favorite news organization hasn't made mistakes that cast doubt on its trustworthiness. Also, no one can say whether factual errors are caused by sloppiness or bias.

A more troubling question is whether enough of us want to find trustworthy sources of information. If you believe most media observers, most of us seek out media outlets that present news slanted to reinforce our beliefs. It could be because we think we're in a culture war and we need to support our allies. It could be because we're so confused by the claims of every media outlet to be The Source Of Unbiased, Reliable Information that we've thrown up our hands and simply handed ourselves over to whatever source is least likely to insult us. Whatever the reason, this pernicious habit of balkanizing ourselves into echo chambers is a tall, perhaps unbreachable obstacle to getting to Fishkin's promised land of a well-informed population capable of determining rational responses to its problems.

The hamster wheel of news

The Columbia Journalism Review has a piece warning that journalists are pursuing quantity rather than quality in their stories. This is largely driven by the perceived value of providing a constant stream of new information, rather than chasing down stories that might be more significant but that require more time to nail down (and thus prevent the reporter from writing other pieces in the meantime). This is the "hamster wheel" on which reporters and their publications are running -- and getting nowhere.

The most underused words in the news business today: let’s pass on that.

The lament that journalists don't do enough long-form investigative pieces isn't new: I remember hearing this as far back as the 1980s, when newsrooms were already suffering painful cuts. The McPaperization of our newspapers probably has gotten worse since then, though. Back in the '80s the New York Times could reasonably be considered a luxury if you didn't live in New York. Today, in the San Francisco Bay Area, it's the only paper that provides enough context to its stories for them to make any sense. If the best-known of the area's local papers, the lamentably bad San Francisco Chronicle, had any good investigative pieces on any kind of regular basis, I'd consider subscribing to it. Hell, if its ordinary stories had any kind of depth, I'd consider it. As it is, though, it's a ridiculously easy decision to ignore the Chronicle's periodic importuning for my business. (Sorry to Tim Goodman, the paper's sardonic TV critic and a longtime favorite of mine.)

The piece also reminds me that "information" in some contexts is, as Wikipedia's definition puts it, merely "an ordered sequence of symbols." Information as such isn't necessarily valuable: radio static, for instance, can be considered information. That's what today's Web reminds me of, radio static. That's what the CJR piece is warning against: mindless, meaningless, valueless noise, peddled as journalism.

A non-obvious side effect of running on the hamster wheel is that, "for all the activity it generates, the Wheel renders news organizations deeply passive," making them easily manipulable by public relations specialists. Ask yourself how beneficial that is for the average person. You can't even rely on a finely honed bullshit detector, because there is nothing but bullshit being flung far and wide on some stories.

The piece concludes that the hamster wheel is a dead end both journalistically and financially. I don't know about that. The elephant in the room is that back in the 1980s, USA Today showed that people will buy the journalistic equivalent of mediocre tapas plates, little bites that, if consumed in sufficient quantity, leave you with the impression you've had a full meal. The paper's malign influence spread throughout the industry, and now a whole lot of people consider that kind of short, context-free writing to be sufficient for their needs. How will the journalists and publications who won't run the hamster wheel make a living in the face of the public's degraded taste in news?

Too much information

In a thoughtful essay, Joshua Benton muses on a side effect of our information-soaked modern environment. It's the kind of writing of which I don't see enough online, boasting a perspicacity that contrasts refreshingly with the dryly factual, often snarky technical and political writing that makes up the bulk of my reading. You should read the whole thing, but if you want to get to the crux of his thinking:

How many people think the tragedy of 21st century America is that there isn’t enough information to consume? How many people feel a desperate need for more “content” in their lives? If they consume much online news, there’s a good chance they experience some version of the anxiety Chee and Sontag talk about, the hyperinformed, undercontextualized mind. The major news organizations are engaged in a massive land grab, spreading their sites as wide as possible, adding in more blogs, more citizen journalism, more slideshows, more everything. I get the pageview-driven economics behind that. But have we made much progress in figuring out ways to present news in structures that reduce the information anxiety of our readers, not increase it? That have a satisfying beginning and end, not just an endless stream of “content”?

"The hyperinformed, undercontextualized mind." What a wonderful phrase.

Sontag's argument, according to Chee as related by Benton, is that novels are a way of making sense of the larger world: they reduce that world to a microcosm that is more readily comprehended by the mind. Benton argues that journalists ought to consider taking a larger role in that process of making sense of bigger things.

I think he's right, but is it too difficult a job to make it profitable? I worry that not enough people have the patience to pore through essays that do their subjects real justice, because the inescapable truth is that such pieces tend to be long. How many people really will read Jane Mayer's profile of the Koch brothers (it amounts to fourteen 8.5"x11" pages on my computer)?

I also worry about how trustworthy those pieces will be, or at least how trustworthy they'll be perceived to be. The context of information is rarely as free from controversy as the information itself. Quoting what the President said in a speech is straighforward; reporting how that speech jibes with the President's policy, or how it squares with the Administration's actions, invites rancor.

Yet we absolutely need to spend more time and energy making sense of what we see, hear, and read, rather than seeking more of it out.

I think a lot of people spend time following "news" that is actually bad for them. Going back a ways, was it really necessary to follow the O.J. Simpson case? The murders were unquestionably heinous, but when it came down to it, what difference did it make in your life?

Did the disappearance of [name of girl] from [place name] really matter to you, other than as a topic of conversation over lunch?

At some point, was there anything more to learn from [overseas disaster]?

These things are all important to someone, but in an age where we're bombarded by information from all sides, you have to be your own filter. Just as you have to watch what you eat, you have to watch what information you absorb. Only then do you stand a chance of making sense of it all.