From James Williams, in an interview by Brian Gallagher.
What’s happened is, really rapidly, we’ve undergone this tectonic shift, this inversion between information and attention. Most of the systems that we have in society—whether it’s news, advertising, even our legal systems—still assume an environment of information scarcity. The First Amendment protects freedom of speech, but it doesn’t necessarily protect freedom of attention. There wasn’t really anything obstructing people’s attention at the time it was written. Back in an information-scarce environment, the role of a newspaper was to bring you information—your problem was lacking it. Now it’s the opposite. We have too much.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen.
Think of this as an environment that rewards the most clever spammers.
Social media hasn’t turned Japan upside down. Instead of blaming social media, why not look at the actual problems people are raising.
I think all that will really come from this line of thought is that lots of things which are true but conflict with progressivism will be deemed “fake news” and banned. He even uses the term in his article.
In the end, the overload is to our capacity to enforce common notions of ethics.
Our current toolkit for how to deal with such things; discretion and reputation, have been overwhelmed, and government and law is no solution either. Tech has a fundamental trust problem.
Tech moves forward by stacking solutions. Consider a modern smartphone. Ultimately, we are forced to trust all sorts of underlying operations that make it work. If we are constantly having to fight back the tendencies of corporations to slip hidden advantages into the stack, we are looking at a dismal future.
Eventually there will need to be a reorganization of tech and the internet around notions of trust and identity. Long term, the current business models that drive FaceBook and Google will fall apart.
Most of this stuff isn’t information, its entertainment or infotainment, journalists love newspapers as some kind of truth seeking apparatus, but the majority of stories are fluff forgotten in a few hours. 90%-99% of the medium is, and always has been, short stories/vignettes taking the plots from real life, not actionable information. Consider the business sections of newspapers, by the time you are physically reading the “news” it has been priced into the market for 10-15 hours.
“The First Amendment protects freedom of speech, but it doesn’t necessarily protect freedom of attention.”
That sentence sends a few chills up my spine. Government protection of ‘freedom attention’ sounds some kind of newspeak for censorship. Which is what we seem to be flirting with in response to the Facebook/Russia panic.
And I’m really not buying the ‘information overload’ thesis any more than I bought the idea that ‘advertising creates artificial needs’ or Barry Schwartz’s ‘paradox of choice’ (picked up by Bernie Sanders) which claimed that too many kinds of breakfast cereal and toothpaste was making us miserable. It’s funny that nobody ever frets about ‘too many choices’ when it comes to book stores or public libraries (talk about information overload!)
Personally, I find the present information environment quite congenial. It’s astonishingly easy to find relevant information that would have required a great deal of effort and cost decades ago (travel information, product reviews, online tips and lessons, etc, etc) and yet advertisers are much less able to bother me than in the past. GMail filters my spam very effectively. We watch streaming services almost exclusively, and so rarely see commercials (I can’t tell you how few political ads we saw during the last presidential campaign season — it was delightful). And I really don’t find it takes any effort or saps my willpower not to follow the click-bait links at the bottom of web pages. ‘Information overload’ sound to me like a case where the cure would definitely be worse than the disease (particularly if it involves government regulation of online speech).
Today’s “news” outlets are little more than signal repeaters: all you have to do is count the number of times the same phrasing appears in headlines and text.
Daniel Greenfield has a nice article that contrasts true reporting, as it was once understood, with what he calls ” The media’s real business [of] serving as a clearinghouse for narratives.”
http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/268280/story-laundering-fusion-gps-fake-news-russians-and-daniel-greenfield
Search engines sort it out fairly well.