information got to live longer, got to have sex, and pass on their genes. We’re information-consumption machines that evolved in a world where information about survival was scarce. But now it’s abundant. With cheap information all around us, if we don’t consume it responsibly, it could have serious health consequences.
Chapter 5. Welcome to Information Obesity
In 2004, after two years of my Howard Dean–based information diet, I headed home to Albany, Georgia, for Thanksgiving dinner. It’s like a national holiday in my giant southern family—come to my family’s house on Thanksgiving and you’ll begin to wonder whether or not the whole thing about us all being related in the South is true. It seems like the whole state is at our house.
One of my favorite relatives is my dad’s brother—Uncle Warren. He’s got a deep drawl that makes you want to sip lemonade and sit on the front porch all day, and is so charming that he could convince Alex Trebek to give up on the trivia questions and just go fishing. He also loves Fox News, and thinks that if we all listened to a little more of it, we all might be a bit better off.
In that fall of 2004, Uncle Warren and I had very different information diets. It had become a sort of family tradition in the years prior for my uncle and I to clash, but this year I made it a point before my voyage home, that Uncle Warren—the symbolic head of the ultra-right-wing sect of the Johnson family—would be proven unequivocally wrong on all issues.
In my mind, I was right, and he was wrong. It just had to be the case. I mean—every news report I’d ever read on DailyKos, every data point I’d seen, and all the polls I’d seen on Zogby agreed with
What I didn’t account for was that Uncle Warren watched the news he believed in, too. He showed up with his own set of “facts.” I’d also neglected to read the aforementioned studies about how facts tend to be particularly poor at persuasion, especially the ones that you pick up on left-wing blogs or the ones that you pick up in the left-of-center bars in Washington, D.C.
The conversation, viewed from the outside, couldn’t have been considered coherent. It was just an explosion of nonsense—two grown men shouting at each other about taxes, gun control, and healthcare, with some perfectly good turkey between us. That Thanksgiving, Uncle Warren left early, and things haven’t been the same between us since.
It’s a shame, really. My uncle and I in a big fight, essentially invading a family tradition because we had developed our own biases, and had both become too attached to our separate—and separating—ideas of reality. Information obesity can inflict some pretty serious damage on families.
Our media companies aren’t neuroscientists, nor are they conspiratorial. There’s no elaborate plot aimed at driving Americans apart to play against each other in games of reds vs. blues. A more pragmatic view is that our economy is organic. Through the tests of trial and error, our media companies have figured out what we want, and are giving it to us. It turns out, the more they give it to us, the more we want. It’s a self-reinforcing feedback loop.
When we tell ourselves, and listen to, only what we want to hear, we can end up so far from reality that we start making poor decisions. The result is a public that’s being torn apart, only comfortable hearing the reality that’s unique to their particular tribe.
Even our leaders in Congress feel the effects. In September of 2011, Speaker of the House John Boehner said that sometimes talking to the President was like “two different people from two different planets who barely understand each other.”[50]
It’s a new kind of ignorance epidemic:
According to a 2009 Public Policy Polling survey, 39% of people in the United States believe that the United States government should stay out of Medicare (a government-run program). Ten percent of people are not certain or do not believe that Hawaii is a state, and 7% believe that Barack Obama is from France.[51]
We know that we’re losing touch, too. Or at least we have a feeling that we’re losing our grasp of the facts. In a December 2010 poll done by
These problems don’t stem from a lack of information. They stem from a new kind of ignorance: one that results in the selection and consumption of information that is demonstrably wrong. We don’t trust “the news” but we do trust “our news,” in other words, the news we want to believe in. And that’s a far more potent weapon than our classic view of ignorance.
In 1969, the tobacco company Brown & Williamson came to the conclusion that the only way it was going to save itself from intense regulation and market loss due to health concerns over cigarette use was through the
With that, Big Tobacco started producing as much doubt as it did cigarettes. It spent millions of dollars on funding research, and academic papers were released saying that Alzheimer’s Disease is prevented by smoking cigarettes (makes sense: you’ll be dead before you get it), and that smoking may boost immune systems.
Big Tobacco created independent organizations, too, such as the Center for Indoor Air Research to “broaden research in the field of indoor air quality generally and expand interest beyond the misplaced emphasis solely on environmental tobacco smoke.” It set up Associates for Research In the Science of Enjoyment (ARISE) to provide research bolstering the idea that smoking’s effects on relaxation could boost immune systems.
Big Tobacco figured something out: it didn’t have to worry about people who smoked and didn’t watch the news. They’d keep smoking. It needed to create doubt in the minds of smokers who
