Keller, Stoll, and Carr all point to something interesting: new technologies do create anthropological changes in society. Yet some of these critics seem to miss the mark; the Internet is not some kind of meta bogey man that’s sneaking into Mr. Carr’s room while he sleeps and rewiring his brain, nor did Mr. Stoll’s 1995 computer sneak up behind him and handcuff him to a keyboard.
Moreover, the subtext of these theories—and ones like them—is that there may be some sort of corporate conspiracy to try to, as Jobs put it, “dumb us down.” Somehow I doubt that Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, woke up one morning with a plan to rewire our brains. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is probably not a super-villain looking to destroy the world’s attention span with the medium’s 140-character limit. Mark Zuckerberg is likely not trying to destroy the world through excessive friendship-building.
Blaming a medium or its creators for changing our minds and habits is like blaming food for making us fat. While it’s certainly true that all new developments create the need for new warnings—until there was fire, there wasn’t a rule to not put your hand in it—conspiracy theories wrongly take free will and choice out of the equation. The boardroom of Kentucky Fried Chicken does not have public health as its top priority, true, but if everyone suddenly stopped buying the chicken, they’d be out of business in a month. Fried chicken left in its bucket will not raise your cholesterol. It does not hop from its bucket and deep-dive into your arteries. Fried chicken (thankfully) isn’t autonomous, of course, and isn’t capable of such hostility.
As long as good, honest information is out there about what’s what, and people have the means to consume it, the most dangerous conspiracy is the unspoken pact between producer and consumer.
Out of the four critiques—those of Keller, Carr, Pariser, and Stoll— Pariser’s is the one that makes the most sense to me. Personalization today is mostly a technical issue with consequences that the technologists at our major Internet companies are developing in order to keep us clicking. That said, personalization isn’t an evil algorithm telling us what our corporate overlords want us to hear; rather, it’s a reflection of our own behavior.
If right-of-center links are not showing up in your Facebook feed, it’s likely because you haven’t clicked on them when you’ve had the opportunity. Should corporations building personalization algorithms include mutations to break a reader’s filter bubble? Should people be able to “opt out” of tracking systems? Absolutely. But readers should also accept responsibility for their actions and make efforts to consume a responsible, nonhomogenous diet, too. The problem isn’t the filter bubble, the problem is that people don’t know that their actions have opaque consequences.
As with Socrates’ reluctance to embrace the written word, critics like Carr and Stoll are onto something, but they’re attacking the wrong thing. It wasn’t the written word that has stopped most of us from memorizing the epic Odyssey; rather, it is our choice not to memorize it anymore, and to read books instead.
Anthropomorphized computers and information technology cannot take responsibility for anything. The responsibility for healthy consumption lies with human technology, in the software of the mind. It must be shared between the content provider and the consumer, the people involved.
There Is No Such Thing as Information Overload
Once we begin to accept that information technology is neutral and cannot possibly rewire our brains without our consent or cooperation, something else becomes really clear: there’s no such thing as information overload.
It’s the best “first world problem” there is. “Oh, my inbox is so full,” or, “I just can’t keep up with all the tweets and status updates and emails” are common utterances of the digital elite. Though we constantly complain of it—of all the news, and emails, and status updates, and tweets, and the television shows that we feel compelled to watch—the truth is that information is not requiring you to consume it. It can’t: information is no more autonomous than fried chicken, and it has no ability to force you to do anything as long as you are aware of how it affects you. There has always been more human knowledge and experience than any one human could absorb. It’s not the total amount of information, but your information habit that is pushing you to whatever extreme you find uncomfortable.
Even so, we not only blame the information for our problems, we’re arrogant about it. More disturbing than our personification of information is the presumption that the concept of information overload is a new one, specific to our time.
In 1755, French philosopher Denis Diderot noted:
“As long as the centuries continue to unfold, the number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed in nature as it will be to find it hidden away in an immense multitude of bound volumes.”[23]
Diderot was on target with the continuous growth of books, but he also made a common mistake in predicting the future. He presumed that technology would stay complacent. In this short verse, he didn’t anticipate that with an increasing number of books, new ways to classify and organize them would arise.
A century after Diderot wrote, we had the Dewey Decimal system to help us search for those bits of truth “hidden away in an immense multitude of bound volumes.” Two and a half centuries later, the pages are bound not to bookbindings, but to electronic formats. It has never been faster and easier than with Amazon to find and buy a book in either a print or electronic version. And Google would be delighted if every word of every book were searchable—on Google.
To say, therefore, that the Internet causes our misinformation ignores history. In the modern arms race between fact and fiction, it’s always been a close fight: we’re no better at being stupid or misinformed than our grandparents were. It’s the ultimate ironic form of generational narcissism. History is filled with entire cultures ending up misinformed and misled by ill-willed politicians and deluded masses.
Just like Stoll and Carr, Diderot was onto something, but he was lured into the trap of blaming the information technology itself.
The field of health rarely has this problem: one never says that a lung cancer victim dies of “cigarette overload” unless a cigarette truck falls on him. Why, then, do we blame the information for our ills? Our early nutritionist, Banting, provides some prescient advice. He writes in Corpulence:
“I am thoroughly convinced, that it is quality alone which requires notice, and not quantity. This has been emphatically denied by some writers in the public papers, but I can confidently assert, upon the indisputable evidence of many of my correspondents, as well as my own, that they are mistaken.”[24]
Banting’s letter gives us an idea of what the real problem is. It’s not information overload, it’s information overconsumption that’s the problem. Information overload means somehow managing the intake of vast quantities of information in new and more efficient ways. Information overconsumption means we need to find new ways to be selective about our intake. It is very difficult, for example, to overconsume vegetables.
23
http://books.google.com/books?id=z5MelCA-zzIC&pg=PA85&lpg=PA85&dq=As+long+as+the+centuries+continue+to+unfold,+the+number+of+#v=onepage&q=As%20long%20as%20the%20centuries%20continue%20to%20unfold%2C%20the%20number%20of&f=false