You Think You Consume Information. What if the Opposite Is True?
In 1981, an Italian six-year-old boy named Alfredo Rampi fell into a well. The dramatic attempt to rescue him was televised live, and seen around the world. I was a sixth-grader in Argentina at the time, and it left an impression on me. I remember the strong emotions I felt as I followed the developments. Sadness, fear, anxiety. Could this happen to me? What would it feel like to be him? His parents? I couldn’t wait for the news updates, I desperately wanted the story to have a happy ending (it did not).
I was taking a shower this morning, trying to think of an example of a news event that affected me even though I could do nothing about it. All of a sudden Alfredo’s name popped in my head. When I came back to the computer I did a quick search, and found the Wikipedia article about him. My recollection was reasonably accurate, who knows why. Of course, there must be many similar stories that I have completely forgotten. If this event had happened before the twentieth century, I certainly would not have heard about it. However, in the age of satellite television these stories became a daily occurrence. I just read Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, which discusses the phenomenon of how television changed our relationship with information. Postman reminds us that for most of humanity’s history, information used to move as fast as a person could carry it. Then the telegraph was invented, and suddenly it became cheap to send data over thousands of miles. However, our needs and mental processing power did not change. Once information became abundant, we had to become selective. For the first time we had the luxury of asking: what information do we want, and why?
Early humans must have placed high value on information that could save their lives. Imagine that you and I were abducted and left in the middle of a forest, isolated from civilization. No food, no water, the nearest road might be one hundred miles away. We would have to figure out what water is safe to drink, what plants are edible, what animals are dangerous. Which way should we walk? Seeking those answer must have been a frequent activity during most of our history. If father says “don’t eat that mushroom or you’ll die,” you listen and remember. If you lived in a small community, the total amount of information you could access was very limited. Therefore, you wanted to pay attention to actionable bits like that one. The ratio between action and information must have been very high compared to today. When I come across some new information and I want to know if it’s worth knowing and remembering, I could ask questions such as:
Is there any value in knowing this?
Would my life be worse if I didn’t know this?
Should I change anything I do now that I know this?
When will this information be useful to me?
If I take a random headline from the internet, most likely the answers will be “no, no, no, most likely never." Let’s give it a try, I will check the front page of CNN.
Maybe I got lucky, but I was pretty confident that none of the stories would be actionable. It’s not my intention to mock CNN, and claim that their content is worthless. I am sure these articles are entertaining. I may want to discuss them with my group, to nurture a sense of belonging. “Look, we are all paying attention to the same things. There are current events we can talk about.” The point I want to make is not that we should only read history books, and completely ignore the news. The question I am trying to answer for myself is, what should be my relationship with information? When should I let my guard down and pay attention to a story that jumps in front of me?
When I was a teenager, it was possible to spend hours or even days disconnected from the world. We had no pocket computers that would vibrate to request our attention. When I was in my early twenties, I went hiking in Patagonia with a friend for ten days. During that entire time we had no connection with civilization, except for other random hikers we met. I remember speculating about news that cared about at the time. For example, did River Plate beat Boca Juniors last Sunday? Did the flooding in the northeast get any worse? I don’t think we discussed or cared about politics or foreign affairs, we just forgot those things existed. Upon returning to civilization, we were once again be exposed to the flow of information. This was right before the internet, and I realize that in a way it was perhaps the worst of all worlds. My daily died of media came from TV and radio designed for generic audiences, and it was still difficult to find the information I wanted. I wasn’t much better off than my grandparents in that respect. If I wanted to learn about something new in 1992, I had to find a specialty magazine or a book on the topic. If the library did not contain the answer, I had to use my social network to find a knowledgeable human that might know. Or perhaps would know someone who knew.
Back to the present. I wake up in the morning, and I open my computer. I reflexively go through different tabs in my browser. I refresh them to see what has changed in the past eight hours. I am aware that this is just entertainment. If something important had happened, then I would have received text messages from friends and family. If I go to Twitter, my timeline is a random display of conversations that an algorithm chose with the goal of making me engage. If I do engage I will probably experience emotions, and I am unlikely to gain useful wisdom. Once again, I am not going to say this is worthless. My grandmother used to spend a good part of her afternoon watching soap operas. She knew she was not enriching her intellect, and that she was doing it only for entertainment. Soap operas of course stirred emotions, in the same way a rage-filled Twitter dunk does. The difference is that grandma was not fooling herself. She did not believe that she was becoming better informed. When she yelled things like “leave him already! Can’t you see he is in love with your cousin and he’s just using you?” she did not actually expect María to listen.
What I am advocating here is a shift in control. If I could, I would completely block certain kinds of content from hijacking my attention. I don’t want to know the play-by-play of a potential Russian invasion of Ukraine, for example. I want to know nothing about developments in the world of entertainment, politics or sports that happened in the past day. Knowing that these things exist is inevitable, and finding out more information about them (if I ever need to) is trivial.
Imagine you could have an information butler. A genie that knew what mattered to you, and that left you alone most days. Once a week or so the genie would tell you about something that matters. In my case, it might be things like:
You don’t need your contact lenses anymore. There is a new quick and easy procedure that will make your vision perfect. It was expensive and annoying until a couple months ago, but now it’s finally a no-brainer.
Your car is reaching the end of its useful life. I know you wanted to buy a new car, and it looks like the supply chain is normalizing. Three months from now will be a good time to buy a car, so it would be a good idea to start doing test drives around now.
Your favorite science fiction author just published the last part of the trilogy you’ve been reading.
You could argue this article itself is an example of unwanted information, and I would say you’re right. Most likely you did not think “I want to read what Diego wrote, I will now go to his site.” Instead, an algorithm captured your attention for a minute and here we are. My genie most likely would not have mentioned this article to me, and yours might do the same. He might think “this article is useless, this is my job.” Of course the butler does not exist, so we have to do that job ourselves. I only recently realized that I am not happy being a cog in the information machine. I am sure there are mathematical models of me out there as an entity that works like this:
On a given day, see N pieces of information. I could estimate N if I tried, but let’s go with an average of 500.
Decide which are worthy of attention.
Out of those, decide which to share (say 5 or 10) and with whom.
What am I planning to do about it?
Limit my daily interaction with unstructured flows of information like Twitter. I would like to completely remove it from my life, but I don’t think I am capable of doing that voluntarily.
Limit the number of information pieces I share. Even though this will not make a difference in the world, I will make me feel better.
Put some time in my schedule to think about what kind of information I would like to consume in a given week. What do I want to learn about? Where do I find this information? How do I avoid getting distracted by information I don’t want?
In other words, I want to turn the tables. My goal is to become a consumer of information once again, rather than a resource for information to propagate itself. It will not be easy:
