Information Gloom and Doom

There is a personality type that worries too much, that sees the future as threatening, and wants to stop everything.

Here's a bit from a posting by Steven Pinker on the Edge web site that puts the fear of "information overload" nicely.

You'll be amazed at the number of things you remember that never happened, at the number of facts you were certain of that are plainly false. Everyday conversation, even among educated people, is largely grounded in urban legends and misremembered half-truths. It makes you wonder about the soundness of conventional wisdom and democratic decision-making — and whether the increasing availability of fact-checking on demand might improve them.

I mention this because so many discussions of the effects of new information technologies take the status quo as self-evidently good and bemoan how intellectual standards are being corroded (the "google-makes-us-stoopid" mindset). They fall into the tradition of other technologically driven moral panics of the past two centuries, like the fears that the telephone, the telegraph, the typewriter, the postcard, radio, and so on, would spell the end of civilized society.

Other commentaries are nonjudgmentally fatalistic, and assume that we’re powerless to evaluate or steer the effects of those technologies — that the Internet has a mind and a will of its own that’s supplanting the human counterparts. But you don’t have to believe in "free will" in the sense of an immaterial soul to believe in "free will" in the sense of a goal-directed, intermittently unified, knowledge-sensitive decision-making system. Natural selection has wired that functionality into the human prefrontal cortex, and as long as the internet is a decentralized network, any analogies to human intentionality are going to be superficial.

Here's his antidote the this chronic pessimism about "information overload" leading to our doom:

One way to attain this objectivity is to run the clock backwards and imagine that old technologies are new and vice-versa. Suppose someone announced: "Here is a development that will replace the way you’ve been doing things. From now on, you won’t be able to use Wikipedia. Instead you’ll use an invention called The Encyclopedia Britannica. You pay several thousand dollars for a shelf-groaning collection of hard copies whose articles are restricted to academic topics, commissioned by a small committee, written by a single author, searchable only by their titles, and never change until you throw the entire set and buy new ones." Would anyone argue that this scenario would make us collectively smarter?

And here is his evaluation of our future in this world of "information overload"...

For all their flaws, media such as Wikipedia, news feeds, blogs, website aggregators, and reader reviews offer the potential for great advances over the status quo — not just in convenience but in intellectual desiderata like breadth, rigor, diversity of viewpoints, and responsibility to the factual record. Our intellectual culture today reflects this advance — contrary to the Cassandras, scientific progress is dizzying; serious commentary on the internet exceeds the capacity of any mortal reader; the flow of philosophical, historical, and literary books (many of doorstop length) has not ebbed; and there is probably more fact-checking, from TV news to dinner tables, than an any time in history. Our collective challenge in dealing with the Internet is to nurture these kinds of progress.

I'm with Steven Pinker. Today is infinitely preferable to the past. Much more information is at my fingertips and I have learned tricks to "surf" this tsunami of information to find great quality stuff of specific interest to me. I have no fear of the future. I can look back over 50 years and say "my future turned out great!" What I had access to in 1960 is pitiful to what I work with today.

By the way, that issue of Edge is full of other interesting people and their viewpoint on the issue of "information overload". Go read it.

Finally, here is the video interview with Frank Schirrmacher that poses the worry about "information overload":