The Information Diet Page 5

  We all live in our own social bubbles, which we create and empower through our social relationships—and interestingly, new research says that these relationships have profound impacts on us. The friends we select, and the communities in which we work, play, and love serve as filters for us. It’s too high of a cognitive and ego burden to surround ourselves with people that we disagree with.

  If you’re a Facebook user, try counting up the number of friends you have who share your political beliefs. Unless you’re working hard to do otherwise, it’s likely that you’ve surrounded yourself with people who skew towards your beliefs. Now look beyond political beliefs—how many of your friends share the same economic class as you?

  With social media, it becomes more difficult to escape these biases. Eli Pariser, the former executive director of MoveOn.org, observed that though he worked hard to maintain strong relationships with conservative friends, the links that they were posting to Facebook suddenly disappeared from his news feed. Why? Facebook had determined that he wasn’t clicking on them, and thus Facebook decided to remove them to make more room for the stuff that he was clicking on.

  Before Pariser’s Facebook feed got personalized for him, though—and before his web searches, online newspapers, and blogs were personalized by other companies—Pariser made some choices of his own: he chose his friends, he chose what to click on, and he chose how long to spend consuming that information. All of that information went in to the algorithms that predict what will interest him in the future.

  Those algorithms are everywhere: our web searches, our online purchases, our advertisements. This network of predictions is what Pariser calls the Filter Bubble in his book by the same name (Penguin Press)—the network of personalization technology that figures out what you want and keeps feeding you that at the expense of what you don’t want. It’s different than the A/B testing based on popular opinion; this systemic personalization is supposed to bring us what is relevant to us.

  Pariser’s filter bubble existed long before the invention of personalized technologies. We started doing it ourselves when we started forming societies and developing our own personal networks. We tend to associate with people who believe the same things we do, unless we have to associate with them by force of turkey, like me and Uncle Warren.

  What is new is automatic personalization as a way of coping with surplus information, and the fact that those choices we’re making are having more immediate, more transparent consequences.

  Personalization is just a mirror that reflects our behavior back to us, and while some might argue that the best way to make our reflections look better is to change the shape of the mirror, the fairest way to do it is to change what it’s reflecting. We build filters around us with every friend we make, and every time we click. Without careful consideration, we risk throwing ourselves into more agnotological bubbles, and drifting farther away from reality.

  Chapter 6. The Symptoms of Information Obesity

  “There’s nothing on it worthwhile, and we’re not going to watch it in this household, and I don’t want it in your intellectual diet.”

  —Kent Farnsworth, summarizing his father Philo Farnsworth’s view on the device he invented: the television[62]

  The Connection Between Obesities

  It turns out that sitting for long periods of time isn’t particularly good for you. Whether you’re sitting behind a computer, sitting in front of a television, sitting in your car listening to the radio on your way to work, or sitting and reading this book, we are usually sedentary when we’re consuming information.

  In 2004, one physician coined the term Sedentary Death Syndrome to classify all the diseases that come from the sedentary state. The effects: heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and yes, obesity. Some researchers are calling it the second largest threat to public health in America. What are we doing when we’re sedentary? Few of us are meditating. We’re usually consuming information.

  New research points to sitting, especially amongst men, as a leading cause of death. Even if you exercise regularly, it turns out that sitting for long periods of time can be deadly. Dr. James Levine of the Mayo Clinic:

  “Adults who spent more than four hours a day sitting in front of the television had an 80 percent increased risk of death from cardiovascular disease compared with adults who spent less than two hours a day in front of the TV. This risk was independent of other risk factors such as smoking or diet.

  And it’s not just TV watching. Any extended sitting—whether that’s at a desk or behind the wheel—increases your risk. What’s more, a few hours a week at the gym doesn’t seem to significantly offset the risk.”[63]

  Most of us aren’t consuming information while jogging on a treadmill. If you have a desk job, it’s likely that your desk is one that comes with a chair, not a pad on the ground for comfortable standing. But as we sit there in front of our computers, we are slowly killing ourselves just waiting for the next hit of dopamine to come into our inbox.

  As of 2008, according to the UCSD, we were consuming 11.8 hours of information per day per person while we’re not at work.[64] While some of that may be listening to music or the radio while we’re running on the treadmill, most of those hours are spent sitting down.

  Do us both a favor: stand up and stretch, take a break and walk around for a bit. I’d like for you to finish this book.

  The nice thing about physical obesity is that you can pretty easily tell if you’re obese. Body dysmorphia aside, one need only to fly on a major airline to check oneself—if you need a seatbelt extender, you’re likely obese. If you cannot see, much less touch, your toes because your belly is in the way, you’re likely obese. And if you don’t want to try those tests, any trip to the scale will tell you whether or not you’re suffering from obesity.

  The dangerous thing about information obesity is that it’s a bit more nefarious. It’s difficult to tell if you are suffering from information obesity or have poor information consumption habits. It’s impossible to know if you’re ignorant and as we’ve learned, even if confronted with our own ignorance, it’s likely only to make us run out and consume more misinformation in order to avoid being wrong.

  Socrates’ view on this was simple: just accept your own ignorance as the only thing to be certain about. This view is important to keep in mind, and a healthy foundation for an information diet.

  Information obesity isn’t new. Just as it was possible to be obese 500 years ago, it was possible to experience this new kind of ignorance 500 years ago, too. It was just more expensive, and you had to work much harder for it. But now we’re living in a world of abundance, and as it turns out, information obesity has some pretty serious consequences for our productivity, our health, and our society.

  Apnea

  Linda Stone is a quiet, deliberate woman who is obsessed with our autonomic nervous system: the stuff that we do relatively unconsciously, like make our hearts beat, make our skin perspire, make our mouths salivate, digest food, and, to an extent, breathe. She’s constantly trying to figure out how technology affects this part of our daily function.

  At the recommendation of her doctor, Stone started doing daily breathing exercises every morning to increase her respiratory health and reduce stress. Every morning, she gets up, goes for a short walk, and does 20 minutes of Buteyko breathing exercises.

  When I met with her for the writing of this book, our meeting involved a few gadgets—the emWave2 and the StressEraser, small little contraptions that, when hooked up to your earlobe or the tip of your finger, show you how well you’re breathing, and what your heart rate looks like. They’re pretty simple devices that use a variety of blinking lights and sounds to calm you down and help you achieve an optimal rate of breath.[65]

  You can even attach them to your computer to keep a diary of your breath. Stone often sits with a clip dangling from her ear and into her computer so that she can receive constant feedback there on her screen about her breath and heart rate, and continually t
ry to stay in a relaxed, primed state.

  After a few days of these breathing exercises, she noticed something interesting: just a few minutes after doing her breathing exercises, she’d head to work, check her email, and find herself holding her breath. Noting that there may be something wrong with that, she grabbed her gadgets and got to work finding out if she was the only one holding her breath in front of a monitor.

  After about seven months, and about 200 interviews, Stone found that 80% of the people that she talked to and observed were holding their breath—especially when email came into their inbox.

  So I decided to buy one of these devices and test myself during the writing of this book. I scheduled email checks only twice a day for one hour, and found that during those hours, sure enough, my breathing was more shallow and more irregular than during the hours in which I was writing.

  Linda describes the problem with a term she coined: email apnea. But the irregularities go beyond email: I found that when I was dealing with all different sorts of incoming information online, my breath and heart rate became irregular. Any time I was dealing with something with a number by it or a queue, my breathing changed.

  I noticed something else interesting when I dusted off my marathon training heart rate monitor and began to wear it to the office during the day: when I received a text message, my heart rate went up slightly and wouldn’t go down until I read the text message or after about five minutes—the amount of time I suppose it took me to refocus on my work and forget about the message.

  I’m uncomfortable with this method of consumption. I don’t like a device giving even my most honest and caring of friends the ability to increase my heart rate with the push of a button. It’s too Pavlovian for me. And holding your breath has some serious consequences; not only does it regulate the amount of oxygen and carbon dioxide in your blood, but it also helps regulate your fight/flight response. A lack of oxygen comes with a variety of awful health consequences like diabetes and obesity.

  Poor Sense of Time

  When Email Roz looks up at me after a six hour inbox tour, she seems disoriented. How could it possibly be so late? She was just on her way outside to do some gardening. “What do you mean it’s dark outside?” she’ll ask. Her eyes are a little bloodshot—it’s like waking a person up.

  I get it. The same thing happens to me. When I sit down in front of a computer, it is as though the world around it disappears. Metaphorical blinders go on, and it’s as though I’m almost inside the computer itself. I’ve been captured by my 27” iMac. When I step out from of a long run in front of a computer, it’s almost as though I have to reorient myself in the same way that I reorient myself in the morning when I wake up.

  Every time you get a new email, text message, or other kind of notification, you also get a little hit of our old friend dopamine. It turns out that dopamine not only puts us into a seeking frenzy, but it also distorts our sense of time. We can spend an hour inside of our email inboxes when it feels like just a few minutes.

  Email Roz and her husband Writer Clay have done some pretty terrible things to each other—they’ve left each other at train stations, been late to dinner dates, and let entire evenings pass them by while they’ve sat together. Just a quick check of the email when we get home can often end up in evenings entirely lost to LCD screens.

  Attention Fatigue

  About two years ago, I started to wonder: what the heck happened to my short-term memory? And where did my attention span go? I’ve written a little, pithy 140-character tweet, sent it into the universe, and in no more than five minutes received a reply. The only problem is, I’ve already forgotten what I wrote in the first place. I’ve had to go back, and look at what I said just five minutes ago to understand what the person replying to me is referencing.

  Some days my brain just feels like it’s in a state of frenzy, and I need to keep checking all the different things I need to check. There’s just no time to read the academic papers or even to respond to that email that will take 20 minutes to respond to because there are so many new emails to read.

  The new world of abundant information, as many have noted, is one filled with distraction. On any given day, many of us see thousands of advertisements cleverly designed to capture our attention. We come across scores of links on the Web, custom tailored just for us. Twitter streams across many a desktop, and Facebook’s little red notification number beckons us with the details of our friends at every moment. Our emails, phone calls, and text messages can interrupt us at any second.

  All of this wreaks havoc on our ability to sustain attention. Cory Doctorow points out that whenever we sit at our computers, we’re tuning in to a new “ecosystem of interruption technologies.”

  Nicholas Carr points out in his book, The Shallows (W.W. Norton), that this chorus of siren songs of distraction is wreaking havoc on our brains. We’ve spent hundreds of years now training ourselves to pay attention to something as banal and repetitive as text (compared to the things we used to pay attention to like food and predators) for long periods of time. Carr bemoans the influence that these new interruption technologies are having on our brains, essentially wiring our brains to click on the most insistent distraction.

  Attention is something that requires cognitive energy, and it’s something that we must build up. You don’t train for a marathon by sitting on a couch and you don’t help your attention span by giving in to the temptation of every distraction that comes across your eyeballs. As information becomes more and more tailored, it becomes harder and harder for us to resist pursuing it, and our attention banks carry smaller and smaller balances.

  Loss of Social Breadth

  Social anthropologist Robin Dunbar, alongside several other scientists, has an interesting theory: our neurocognitive resources have a limit to the total number of relationships we can manage—and that number is somewhere between 100 and 250. Informally, the number is estimated to be 150, and it’s called Dunbar’s number.

  Dunbar came to this conclusion by studying human tribes, hunter-gatherer types, and it’s bound to remain relatively true today in the age of the social networks: there is a finite number of people that we can possibly care about, and while that number varies from person to person, it doesn’t come close to the numbers that sit by our names on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

  If Dunbar is right, that means our ability to manage news from friends in new social networks, and to use it to enhance meaningful relationships, is limited. By succumbing to our biases and falling into homogenous groups or epistemic loops, we eliminate the social inputs that bring us news we disagree with. Strong bias for some non–conscious consumers means cutting off meaningful relationships with people we care about but may disagree with.

  The overconsumption of specialized knowledge—whether it be political or technical or even sports-related—can make it so that the only thing you’re capable of holding a conversation about is the thing that you’ve been so deeply into, and thus as your consumption of information around a particular subject becomes more homogenized, if you’re not deliberate and careful, your social group too becomes a reflection of that homogenization.

  Distorted Sense of Reality

  Cults work because they get their members to either convert the people around them or dismiss the nonbelievers as heathens. They’re methodical in their epistemic closure, first building up a new lens to view a lens through, and should someone else see the world differently, that person is either branded a heretic (which comes from a Greek word meaning “choice”) by the orthodoxy, or a “dead agent” in the realm of scientology.[66] Most major cults have some way of labeling the outsider.

  Rapture tends to be an excellent topic area in which to see the effects of epistemic closure, confirmation bias, and poor information diets. Evangelical radio host Harold Camping famously predicted that the world would end and Judgment Day would arrive on May 21, 2011. Two hundred million Christians were to be taken to heaven before a global earthq
uake would destroy the planet.

  Camping’s organization, Family Radio, spent millions of donated dollars on more than 5,000 billboards across the country. He, along with his devoted followers, were certain that on May 21, the world would be filled with rapture and spread the word to everyone who would listen. The world did. The media—television, radio, newspapers, Facebook, and Twitter— were filled with news of the impending rapture.

  Leading up to the event, a Yahoo group called “Time and Judgment,” a group whose purpose was “to discuss the events that the Bible declares will unfold on May 21st, 2011,” was filled with a thousand messages of people professing their faith and sharing plans for the rapture. Leading up to the rapture, the group fed off itself. It was as though people were competing to see who could have the most blind faith.

  Marco M., May 5th: “I have looked at the Biblical evidence for the Rapture and Judgment Day on May 21, 2011. It is solid, convergent, inter-locking and replicable. So, I have no doubt whatsoever that May 21 is Judgment Day. And yes, I have quit my job.”[67]

  Tony V., May 7th: “I am a bus driver for NJ Transit and I get 4 weeks vacation. I took all my vacation in March. But I’m still working so I can spread the Word on my job and still have an income so I can continue to support FR with finances. After May 21 money will be useless, so I want to spend all my money in getting the Word out.”[68]

  Enow A., May 19th: “I just want to use this last chance to write to you to let know how fortunate I consider myself to be part of those spreading the May 21, 2011[sic]. Fellowshipping with you has been a source of enormous blessing and encouragement against the fierce residence I am encountering. By HIS Grace we shall meet in HIS presence soon. God bless you all. Greetings from Cameroon.”[69]