The Unforeseen Consequences Of Too Much Information

From the start of human history until 2008 you never had enough access to information. Then the iPhone was released, and you had access to 90% of humanity’s collective knowledge overnight.

You’ve probably never taken the time to realize how incredibly damaging that could be. And, the care that should be put into how you interact with that corpus.

I’ll separate it into 3 buckets:

Opinion Shopping

You can always find information to backup your opinion regardless of its correctness. This is called Opinion Shopping. We use the internet to confirm our hypothesis or bias, not disprove it.

Another way this idea manifests is what I’ll call the WebMD effect. Regardless of its accuracy, you can find a search query that will lead you to the conclusion that a cough and upset stomach means you have Stage 4 pancreatic cancer.

Social Condescension

Most information is now acquired in an online social setting. This causes most information to be steeped in an extra layer of morality, not objectivity. Information needs a story to be digested properly.

This gives the — in my opinion, 100% intended — ability for the conveyor of information to claim moral superiority over people who disagree with them on any topic.

Given that companies know you’re more likely to engage with content you disagree with, you probably agree with 50% of what you see online at most. For you as the reader you’re left feeling sadness or anger the majority of the time you’re online.

A funny example from my recent encounters.

We attended 2 events in the last 6 weeks, a wedding filled with urbanites and small local agricultural fair (to see if our baby would win the cutest baby contest that I won as a baby and is my singular claim to fame). Co-sleeping with a baby is now largely discouraged due to the increased possibility of child suffocation. The first words I overheard after entering the fair were, “We co-slept for 9 months” with no judgement or hesitancy from the person sharing the information. At the wedding we learned some friends also co-sleep with their children, but only after several reassurances that there was no judgement on our end.

These differences in opinion and willingness to share are mediated by attitudes towards the topic and access to the knowledge about its potential negative consequences. You can see how the expected online reaction to any topic can alter real world interactions.

While not a perfect correlation, information propagates more slowly through rural areas.

The Outrage Industrial Complex

All of the saddest and most nihilistic people I know spend all of their time watching the news or reading it online.

You aren’t programmed to process the tragedies of all 8 billion people on the planet every 24 hours. You’re biologically capable of handling the grief of close family and a handful of friends.

Now you’re plugged into a corporate media apparatus whose job it is to show you all of the most miserable headlines, from across the world, in real time. You’d never know that the world is improving in some of the most important metrics.

Good things happen in decades, catastrophes happen in minutes. Because of that, even if all good news was published — which it isn’t — negative headlines would still outweigh positive ones by 10x due to the time required for upward trends to occur.