Myths of the Internet Age

In the Internet Age, some complain about information overload: too many mails, tweets, status updates…while others are happy to be in an era where we have access to every conceivable piece of information and point of view, with little or no censorship.

Except that both of the above views might just be myths. Or at least that’s the view of these 2 books I will talk about.

The first book, The Information Diet by Clay Johnson, argues that since time immemorial there’s been way more information than any one individual can absorb; and thus the only thing that has changed today is the ease of access to information. Now add to that the fact that nobody is forcing you to consume all that information; and the logical conclusion is that the real problem is voluntary information over-consumption! And isn’t over-consumption an easy problem to solve? As the blogger Shane Parrish said:

“It is very difficult, for example, to overconsume vegetables.”

But is that the entire reality? Some argue that peer pressure is also at play and kind of forces us to read up on everything:

“The internet has granted us knowledge, but now that we’ve eaten the apple, the snake hisses in our ear that everybody and their cousin had already discovered that watered-down bluegrass already, so cover your nudity and feel ashamed.”

Then again, you can choose to resist peer pressure, can’t you? As Richard Feynman said in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out:

“They [must have] expected me to be wonderful to offer me a job like this and I wasn’t  wonderful, and therefore I realized a new principle, which was that I’m not responsible for what other people think I am able to do; I don’t have to be good because they think I’m going to be good. And somehow or other I could relax about this.”

The second book, The Filter Bubble by Eli Pariser, says that what you read on the Internet is really filtered content. Let’s expand on that a bit: Nicholas Negroponte says on one extreme is sycophantic personalization: “you’re so great and wonderful, and I’m going to tell you exactly what you want to hear.” On the other extreme is parental approach: “I’m going to tell you this whether you want to hear this or not, because you need to know.” The search results of Google factors in what you’ve clicked in the past and the kinds of articles you tend to read. And thus ends up falling in the sycophantic personalization camp. Countries like China and dictatorships practice the parental approach. Shane Parrish again:

“When technology’s job is to show you the world, it ends up sitting between you and reality, like a camera lens.”

I find the take of both books interesting: now I sit and wait for them to come to my local library!