Too much information is killing us

Lakshay Pandey
Jul 30, 2017 · 6 min read

I have been sitting on these thoughts for a long long while now. And the more I see things these thoughts just keep getting stronger. So some of this might seem like a rant but just bear with me. All of the rambling should make some sense in the end.

Today there is a lot of brouhaha about fake news, extremism, social media in the world and the social impact of it. Most people are convinced that this might be the reason we have a lunatic in the White House and according to certain sections of our country the same might be true in 7 RCR also. Skipping the validity of these statements I would like to dig a bit deeper into why something like a Facebook can drive such change. For this lets try to rewind by about 40 odd years.

We are now in somewhere in the last part of the 70’s decade, shifting in into the 80’s. There is no internet, phone lines are a luxury and television is yet to start. We have a radio that has the government controlled All India Radio Station. That is our one source for news/entertainment and sports. In this age information is mostly acquired by :

  1. Radio
  2. Books/Magazines/Periodicals
  3. School Textbooks
  4. Anecdotal Conversations with people
  5. Newspapers
  6. Encyclopaedias (Calling them out differently from books)

Another important point to note here is that all of these sources were expected to be absolute fact. There was no questioning these on the validity of the facts. We could argue opinions and inferences based on those facts but not the validity of the facts. There was very little awareness of the world as people had bare minimum travel, information from other countries could only arrive by super slow letters and from people travelling to these places and sharing their anecdotal observations.

If you go further back than that age you will see that the access to information becomes even worse and the we depend even more on anecdotal evidence of people bringing the information and the gap just gets worse with time.

So for about 2–3 million years of human existence (minus 20 years) we have evolved as a species that gets all its information from limited sources and their immediate surroundings and have been trained to treat this information as given fact. You then drew your experience and wisdom by maybe debating very few of those facts and by mostly building your inferences over that. The rate of attaining new information was also slow enough that you had time to assimilate the last information and form inferences and opinions on this.

Now fast forward about 35 years and you are in the Early part of the 2010 decade. Internet has become a regular part of our lives. Significant part of the information consumption has moved to the internet. Also the new list of sources of information looks something like :

  1. Google/Wikipedia
  2. Blogs
  3. Facebook/Twitter/Social Media
  4. Television News Channels
  5. Newspapers
  6. School Textbooks
  7. Books/Magazines/Periodicals
  8. Anecdotal Conversations with people

In roughly this order. What this list fails to signify is that the first three items are exponentially higher in volume than the next 5 to the extent that the other 5 just become drops in the ocean in terms of volume.

Also to the internet parts of that list, there are two major aspects to highlight,

  1. There is now so easy an access to information that we can validate most of our known facts for peanuts.
  2. We also don’t know the source of a lot of information on the internet. We could very well be reading the anecdotal information of people without every knowing the details.

Now fast forward another 7 years and we are in 2017. The major change in the list now is something like this :
Google/Wikipedia

  1. Facebook/Twitter/Social Media
  2. Google/Wikipedia
  3. Television News Channels
  4. Newspapers

Also in the first wave of the internet we got used to newspapers moving to the web and we got used to the idea of being able to consume news online. Now we have about 20 million websites calling themselves News Sources without any of the editorial oversight of something like traditional newspapers. Also earlier you would read one particular newspaper and since you only got one view, you never understood the bias and the tilt of that. Now you have 20 million sources for the same news. These sources could range from something like Reuters to something like a Breitbart or a Scoopwhoop/Huffington Post.

Now people who had evolved over millions of years to accept most information as given were suddenly thrown into the largest most torrential stream of information the world has ever seen without any oversight. Just think of how many “Myths of your Childhood disproved” posts have you seen in the last few years. My heart broke when I realised that the Bermuda Triangle isn’t that big an mystery. I also vividly remember the first time I realised that A.D stands for Anno Domini and not After Death of Christ.

All through my childhood I accepted these two things as fact and it was both scary and strangely uplifting to realise that I was treating these as facts without any validation. Now just broaden the scope and you see that without training you are not used to validating every piece of information that you encounter. Your brain, used to millions of years of habit, treats every internet article as the same level of information as the sources described for the 1970's. When we see the world go crazy about Gurmehar Kaur holding a placard and not realising that its just a normal kid just saying whatever she wants, we also have to realise that most people on the streets are not reacting to it thinking that its just a statement by a teenager. When they see 20 thousand articles on Sites like Huffington Post/Buzzfeed with their personal opinion thrown on it, to most people this seems like mainstream news and they are now thinking of the simple act in that light of being mainstream news.

Also I find it amusing to see people making statements on Social Media to their millions of followers and then act surprised at the information being taken so seriously. Their Social Media accounts contain more reach than most English Newspapers in the country. The information is going to be considered at that scale and at that scale of spread of information this is no longer personal opinion

Of course none of this justifies the way we have become idiotic in our behaviour but until we understand this more and how do evolve more in our perception of information, this is going to be a losing battle. People like Monsieur Trump have at least figured out how to use these problems to their advantage and use the cover, that our blindness to the source of information provides, to push his own agenda.(I call him Monsieur because from his statements I assume he speaks French because he is not really that comfortable in English.)

I personally feel that sites like Buzzfeed, Huffington Post etc. passing of as news websites with sometimes seriously misinformed opinions and only wanting to keep with the most viral trends are causing us more harm than a Breitbart. At least Breitbart is clear in its agenda and you know the bias in those feeds. We might need deeper analysis on the need for better editorial oversight at such places and for them also to look at the impact their reach has.

Even then the most pressing need is for us to start evolving into a species that validates facts before believing them. We now have enough access to at least do a basic validation whenever we want. Also by evolve I mean we genuinely need a Darwin Level Evolution and not a philosophical evolution because without that this situation is almost the same as Guns without Gun Laws. This also means that we have to recognize that validating information is a winning trait in the survival of the fittest theory and if we don’t actively strive for that, it’s hard to land on the winning side.

Lakshay Pandey
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