The Information Diet

to too many cocktail parties on the right or on the left. In early 2010, Sanchez described a problem he saw with the right:

“One of the more striking features of the contemporary conservative movement is the extent to which it has been moving toward epistemic closure. Reality is defined by a multimedia array of interconnected and cross promoting conservative blogs, radio programs, magazines, and of course, Fox News. Whatever conflicts with that reality can be dismissed out of hand because it comes from the liberal media, and is therefore ipso facto not to be trusted. (How do you know they’re liberal? Well, they disagree with the conservative media!)”[60]

Climate change is a perfect example of epistemic closure: science is liberal; climate change is from science; thus climate change is a liberal conspiracy. Every news outlet that reports on it must also be corrupted by liberal influence, and thus can be dismissed. But the left succumbs to epistemic closure too.

Look at the left’s unyielding relationship to organized labor: no institution with that much money is unquestionably good, yet you’ll find many a left-wing operative in Washington looking at you sternly if you question a union’s motives. Talk with a liberal about former District of Columbia schools chancellor Michelle Rhee’s idea that teachers ought to be kept on the payrolls based on their performance, rather than their seniority, and you’ll find yourself in a screaming match pretty quickly.

With its general distrust of pharmaceutical companies, the left is still listening to the likes of Jim Carey and Jenny McCarthy on the now-settled question of whether measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccination causes autism. (It doesn’t.) The left still bristles at the question of nuclear energy, though for every person that dies from nuclear energy, 4,000 people die from coal production.[61]

Epistemic closure is a tool that empowers agnotological ignorance. As certain information is produced, all other sources of information are dismissed as unreliable or worse, conspiratorial.

Filter Failure

You don’t need the liberal or conservative media to make you ignorant. It can come from the production and consumption of information from your friends, and the personalization of that information. The friends we choose and the places we go all give us a new kind of bubble within which to consume information. My experience of delusion on the Dean campaign wasn’t just about my media consumption, but also the association with people who thought, consumed, and believed exactly as I did.

We all live in our own social bubbles, which we create and empower through our social relationships— and interestingly, new research says that these relationships have profound impacts on us. The friends we select, and the communities in which we work, play, and love serve as filters for us. It’s too high of a cognitive and ego burden to surround ourselves with people that we disagree with.

If you’re a Facebook user, try counting up the number of friends you have who share your political beliefs. Unless you’re working hard to do otherwise, it’s likely that you’ve surrounded yourself with people who skew towards your beliefs. Now look beyond political beliefs—how many of your friends share the same economic class as you?

With social media, it becomes more difficult to escape these biases. Eli Pariser, the former executive director of MoveOn.org, observed that though he worked hard to maintain strong relationships with conservative friends, the links that they were posting to Facebook suddenly disappeared from his news feed. Why? Facebook had determined that he wasn’t clicking on them, and thus Facebook decided to remove them to make more room for the stuff that he was clicking on.

Before Pariser’s Facebook feed got personalized for him, though—and before his web searches, online newspapers, and blogs were personalized by other companies—Pariser made some choices of his own: he chose his friends, he chose what to click on, and he chose how long to spend consuming that information. All of that information went in to the algorithms that predict what will interest him in the future.

Those algorithms are everywhere: our web searches, our online purchases, our advertisements. This network of predictions is what Pariser calls the Filter Bubble in his book by the same name (Penguin Press)—the network of personalization technology that figures out what you want and keeps feeding you that at the expense of what you don’t want. It’s different than the A/B testing based on popular opinion; this systemic personalization is supposed to bring us what is relevant to us.

Pariser’s filter bubble existed long before the invention of personalized technologies. We started doing it ourselves when we started forming societies and developing our own personal networks. We tend to associate with people who believe the same things we do, unless we have to associate with them by force of turkey, like me and Uncle Warren.

What is new is automatic personalization as a way of coping with surplus information, and the fact that those choices we’re making are having more immediate, more transparent consequences.

Personalization is just a mirror that reflects our behavior back to us, and while some might argue that the best way to make our reflections look better is to change the shape of the mirror, the fairest way to do it is to change what it’s reflecting. We build filters around us with every friend we make, and every time we click. Without careful consideration, we risk throwing ourselves into more agnotological bubbles, and drifting farther away from reality.

Chapter 6. The Symptoms of Information Obesity

“There’s nothing on it worthwhile, and we’re not going to watch it in this household, and I don’t want it in your intellectual diet.”

—Kent Farnsworth, summarizing his father Philo Farnsworth’s view on the device he invented: the television[62]

My wife Roz is actually three people: there’s Normal Roz, there’s Email Roz, and there’s Zombie Roz. Let me explain.

Normal Roz is a sharp-as-a-tack, sweet-as-a-pixie-stick, pretty-as-they-make-’em woman. She loves the outdoors, loves to garden, and loves to get her hands dirty. She combines a French love for life with the German love of hard work and efficiency. She’s been known to say to me, whilst I’m in the midst of enjoying the miracles of central air conditioning: “Clay, yard work is just like that video game you’re playing, except with a productive outcome.”

But should she run across a computer screen on her way outside to try to plant corn in our 16-square-foot back yard, it’s over. Especially if an email window is open. She will sit down in front of her computer, and (according to her) time no longer exists. Hours later, she’ll look up at me, eyes bloodshot, and wonder why I’m asking her to come to bed. Time stands still for her, the day passes, and she has no idea where it went. Email Roz has no sense of time. I won’t lie—sometimes when she wants me to go do yard work I have left a laptop open between her and the door. Works every time.

But the scary Roz is Zombie Roz. Normal Roz can be on her way anywhere, and if there’s a television playing anything from Fox News to HGTV, Normal Roz turns into Zombie Roz: transfixed, and mouth agape at the television. It’s as though a freeze-ray shoots out of our TV, and once it enters her field of vision, she’s powerless to resist it. I once watched her stare blankly for 15 minutes at a Spanish language cable network. She doesn’t speak Spanish.

I’ve caricaturized my wife to make a point: information consumption makes you sedentary, and sometimes, it ruins your sense of time. Being sedentary is bad for your health.