Information health — a primer

Michael Harris
Nov 4 · 5 min read

During the last few years of data-related scandals and information wars it is hard not to work in the digital world and not sit back and wonder whether we are doing good things — perhaps you have felt the same.

Conversations I hear both in public (I do a fair amount of eavesdropping) and in the media on the subject of the internet and what it does to us tend towards one of these conclusions:

  • The market is king —audiences will eventually tell the market what they really want and need and this will drive “good” behaviours.
  • The individual is king — if people want to addle their brains or be stuck in their echo chamber, let them.

Not that I want to straw-man these points of view of course, but there is clearly both some middle ground between the two and *some* necessary input from designers, media providers, and regulators.

I often feel that there is an element missing in these conversations; and that is the nature of information and the nature of technology itself. Kevin Kelly takes this very seriously and referred to the biomass of all the techy systems and platforms in the world as the ‘Technium’ — to be viewed as like a separate alien ecosystem operating within and above all other ecosystems. I believe there is value in looking at it this way, mainly for the reason that no one person can shut anything down, tell you how part of it works, or know of who else to ask to do either of these.

Information is food

Many people have drawn the comparison between information and food— or pointed out that it’s more a simile than a metaphor; information is actually food. We need it, we ingest it, it keeps us alive. Consider this: You would die more quickly if you were deprived of information (in a sensory deprivation tank) than if you were deprived of food.

We are now at a point in history — largely due to the world wide web — that we suffer from too much information more than we suffer from too little (metaphors aside this is also true with food— more of us die from obesity than from starvation; some claim 3 times as many, and rising).

Too much food

Our eyes take in billions of bits of information a second, and we process a fraction of that. The mechanisms by which we do this are remarkable; we use ‘chunks’ of patterns, rapid response filters, heuristics and rudimentary reasoning even before the brain starts working.

Without ‘shortcuts’ in our processing our brains would simply melt. We use shortcuts to amazing effect; but they are also responsible for such biases like stereotyping, fear of out-groups and pre-judgement.

On a perceptual level we have evolved to cope with too much information. But on any higher level we did not need to cope — until the information age hit us. A story released tomorrow might have 50,000 versions of it by the end of the day; the cost of producing them is so low and the value of readership is so disconnected from their quality that we are all willingly on a fast-food diet of questionable nutritional value.

We really do not know what effect the internet as a whole is having on us — a meta-study published in 2019 revealed the capabilities were there but we do not know exact effects:

…The available evidence indicates that the Internet can produce both acute and sustained alterations in each of these areas of cognition [attention, memory, social cognition] which may be reflected in changes in the brain…

Where are the information safety warnings?

Despite our abilities to learn rapidly through our senses and feedback mechanisms what might kill us, we are also warned about these things. Food packaging, in the places where we buy food, public food campaigns, adverts; we have established patterns of warnings. Where are these for information?

The best way to keep users on screen is to create a dopamine loop by giving variable rewards — such as a never-ending news feed.

We have become experts on keeping people ‘engaged’, but do we tell them when to stop?

We don’t even know what the ‘recommended’ volume of news is for any given day

Much of the difficulty is that platforms know exactly what they are doing and exactly why it works:

Endless updates and notifications in a social space can cause a variety of mental pressures. But it also appears to offer us the solutions.

It is my belief that there are several ‘gulfs’ between the perception and the reality of various systems (both human and silicone) which ultimately enable many negative consequences of digital information.

The internet is not just a tool — when a tool becomes pervasive it becomes you. It can then seem like the internet is reflective of all society and all behaviour.

Providers use all this to their advantage; and the beauty of it is that even when we are aware of the theory behind these effects we still under-estimate them.

We are all in an echo chamber; we may be aware of it but that doesn’t stop it changing us.

The centre for humane technology has an excellent resource called the Ledger of Harms, pulling together evidence for all the noted ways we can be vulnerable to information.

It is not the internet’s fault

I hope that even if none of this is new to you, you still find it valuable to read. As much as I want to inspire this particular brand of pessimism to the digital world right now, it is important to consider the rebuttal of ‘twas ever thus’. Is all this really new? All media before the internet carried with it good and bad; we used and mis-used and abused each one. So it’s not the internet’s fault. It’s our fault. Media holds up the mirror to us. We should recognise ourselves and take action.

However, it is true that the rate of change has increased significantly, and there is no sign of slowing down.

Digital technologies make everything faster, including human vulnerability.

So we come back to the two common conclusions; either the market is king or the individual is king. The question is: At warp-speed, are you comfortable with either?

Thank you for reading.

Michael Harris

Written by

Fascinated by behaviour and the influence of culture and media. Working from Bristol in the digital world. Writing periodically — all thoughts my own.

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