Mr. Greenjeans and the Laptop Bunnies

For those of us who remember the past, or when we had teeth, to learn about the latest good stuff you had merely to turn on Captain Kangaroo in the morning.  Mr. Greenjeans was the family farmer who would daily bring warm and fuzzy creatures that we would want to adopt for some coin, an idea that was later replicated by the web app ‘Farmville’ and virtual  bunnies.

              When bunnies were a ‘Best Buy’

Back then, you could feel and touch the bunnies close up before you made your buying decision, and the knowledgeable farmer was right there to answer any of your questions.  Of course, now we have smart phone apps that can read the bar code on the bunnies, and allow you to find an identical bunny at the factory farm for far less money and a better bunny warranty. Naturally, this puts the family farmer out of business, and leaves your progeny wondering what bunnies are actually like. However, at least we have bunny user reviews.  
                                                                           

Looking and feeling is a user experience that no amount of user reviews can replace.  When shopping moves to the web and our brick and mortar stores close, we are losing something priceless. Presently, pricing apps promote judgment by hearsay rather than experience. So, we will miss our experience with cuddly bunnies, laptops, wide screen displays, hard bound books, and much more of what used to be called a shopping experience. And our bunnies, like everything else, will live somewhere disembodied in the cloud. 

Searching for Red Stockings: The Myth of Information Overload

As the internet advocate Clay Shirky noted, everybody who talks about information overload starts with the graph with the telltale ascending line and the litany of the troubles it entails. As the line informs us, information is increasing exponentially, and we can barely deal with it intellectually and emotionally, or more and more often, we can’t. And the solution?  It is here that the rallying cries diverge.  

Scary Graph (from Basex.com)

On one side there is Shirky, who assigns the problem to filter failure, and why not? It’s a reasonable thing after all to suppose that if we had better ways to sort out information, we could cull the bad from the good, and be able to significantly reduce the information we have to cope with daily.  Search, social media, and e-commerce firms of course concur, and are rapidly improving their search algorithms (using of course information about you that you voluntarily or involuntarily port over to them) so  you can find what you need the first time.

On the other hand is the internet critic Nicolas Carr, who attributes information overload to filter success. In Carr’s opinion our filters are working all too well, and the problem is that they are getting better and better. 

Thus,

“….The real source of information overload…. is the stuff we like, the stuff we want. And as filters get better, that's exactly the stuff we get more of.

It's a mistake, in short, to assume that as filters improve they have the effect of reducing the information we have to look at. As today's filters improve, they expand the information we feel compelled to take notice of. Yes, they winnow out the uninteresting stuff (imperfectly), but they deliver a vastly greater supply of interesting stuff. And precisely because the information is of interest to us, we feel pressure to attend to it. As a result, our sense of overload increases.”

Implicit in both arguments is this premise:

The information we want is the same as the information we need.

This is an argument for the curing salve of better filters (to fine tune what we want, since our wants are finite) or a call for mass despair (because our wants are infinite, and thus overwhelm us when they are invariably served by the web). This premise derives from an assumption that in our hubris we are wont to make: that humans are rational agents that know what they want and why.

But what if this was not true?  What if we are at root irrational creatures who delude ourselves into thinking that we know what we want and why we want it? What if the information we want is more often than not different from the information we need? If this is true, then to paraphrase Shakespeare, our fate is not in the stars (or rather the cloud), but in ourselves, because if the information that we want is often not the same as the information we need, then we need to be aware how to distinguish our wants from our needs and how and when  to constrain the former.  In other words, for information overload, the key is to understand how our basic motivations work.

The question that Shirky and Carr beg is thus elemental: Why is information of interest to us, because it is important, or because of something else?  To answer this question, let us illustrate how a basic search was performed over the last few generations by going to our metaphorical sock drawer in search of red stockings.

It’s 1912, and you as t-shirt manufacturer want to begin a production run of commemorative t-shirts of the Boston Red Stockings triumph in the World Series. As soon as the game is over you receive an immediate telegraph of their victory, and it’s off to the races to start production.

It’s 1932, and you as a t- shirt manufacturer want to get started with your commemorative t-shirt run, and so you listen to the game on the radio, and upon its completion, get to work.

It’s 2012, and you as a t-shirt manufacturer want get to cracking on your production run celebrating the Boston Red Sox victory, and you follow the sox from college draft to preseason to all of their games through the World Series, and monitor all the social and news media who have something to say about it.

In all three time frames, the decision point happens in a second at a predetermined moment, namely when (hopefully) the sox win. The narrative of how that final fact (a sox victory in the final game) got there is irrelevant. No matter what era, the decision point is concise, precise, and momentary, and gets to you on time regardless of the media you use and irrespective of its background story.  There is no need to follow the narrative that describes the changing facts that get us to that point, as the point of the last man flying out in the last inning is all we need.

The difference between the three eras is that in the first era we could not follow the narrative that follows the sox on their way to the pennant, but in the latter era we could. But following the latter comes at a cost.  By following the progress of the sox we become diverted from other things of value, and suffer regret.  If these diversions are small scale and populate our working day, they become distractions and cause us to lose focus and attention. Finally, as we continually choose between distraction and staying on course, we become tense and nervous.

The metaphor of ‘information overload’ would seem to apply here, as every frame of every moment of the continuous narrative leading to the Red Sox pennant can and is considered by the sox fan. However, like a strip of static frames in a motion picture that give rise to a sense of movement or motion, the story is interesting because of the novel ways the narrative changes, and it is the changes that compel. Thus, although the ending is necessary for us to go about our business, the story that leads to it is compelling not because of what it is, but how it is continually transformed.

We can expand our simple Red Sox narrative to the narratives embedded in all the things we do that are being progressively revealed by the web. We need to know facts, but what obsesses us is the narrative or story that brings us to those facts.  The internet produces not just more information, but more narratives of information. We see not a picture, but a movie, not a note, but a score, not a phrase but a speech. Moreover, we conflate the importance of the narrative with the significance of its conclusion, or what we want with what we need. This is a dangerous delusion, for the stuff we want depends upon the narrative or facts in motion, but the stuff we need depends upon the facts sitting still.

We can get the facts we daily need in a half hour, but continually accessing the web to see a moving stock market, middle east crisis, or what Uncle Charlie is up to are never ending stories that excite us, engage us, but ultimately bring us down. A narrative is of course still important if our behavior necessarily changes in tandem. In this case the narrative is ‘feedback’. Thus, a quarterback’s performance is determined by feedback during the moment to moment course of the game. However, for the stadium audience, this feedback is entertainment, and for those who attend to the ever expanding narrative on the game itself, an unnecessary and harmful obsession.

The Myth of Information Overload

As a metaphor, information overload attributes the psychological effects of the internet to what information is rather than how it is arranged.  But humans are above all novelty-seeking creatures, and novelty is enhanced not in the facts but in the stories they tell. Because the explanation for how the web influences us psychologically is based on core assumptions on human motivation that are faulty, we proceed with our daily lives under a dangerous illusion abetted unfortunately by the perverse incentives of our media providers to keep us hanging onto the story when the conclusion is all we need. Whether or not we can escape this illusion and its dire consequences depends ultimately on not just a better story, but also a better explanation as to how our minds actually work.

Sources:

Finding a better story to describe the emerging fact that wanting and liking aren’t the same thing takes you to the seminal work on the topic performed by the neuropsychologist Kent Berridge on the topic, or my own narrative on Berridge’s work and what it means.  Hopefully both make for some interesting explanations.

New book from yours truly!

Here's my new book, with twice the knowledge and half the stupidity of my other stuff.

One Track Minds: The Surprising Psychology of the Internet

This book, in 1000 words (actually, 1,008 words)

Occam’s razor: Tool used by the medieval King Occam of Slovenia to cut the heads off philosophers who rambled on and on. It was later used to describe the logical principle that cut off rambling arguments and replaced with simpler ones, although it may be argued that King Occam had the better idea.

One of the problems with books that have a big idea is that the big idea can be easily communicated in a page or so, leaving the writer with the problem of how to fill in the rest of his opus, which he promptly does by adding the history of the middling ideas leading to his great idea, the great implications of his great idea, repeating his great idea in multiple variations, or just explaining his idea to begin with. Given my own bright idea, this author decided to go through the route of explanation, which if deleted from the manuscript, gives you this page. So here’s the main idea of the book, served not by explanation but analogy, which is thankfully much shorter. 

So I present to you this tale that tells the main idea of our book. Let’s say that you are a tailor, continually in need of needles to pursue your trade.  Consider if you would a haystack, and the fact that for some reason your needles can only be found in the haystack. An inefficient state of affairs to be sure, resulting in your need to painstakingly go through a lot of straw to get to your needle. Let’s say that in your wisdom you design a ‘search engine’ (i.e. a big magnet on a string) that will allow you to sort through all that straw to get to your needles. Passing the magnet over the haystack, you find not only your needle, but lots of needles of every color, form, and shape. The first needle does what you need, but each additional needle is of interest also, but not as much. Nonetheless, you end up spending much more time than you would like looking at all the fine needles in your collection, which you eventually look back ruefully as a big waste of time. In other words, whereas the haystack caused you to waste your time looking for a needle, a stack of needles caused you to waste your time looking at needles.

But wait you say, isn’t looking at all those extra needles rational as well, and represents a free and unfettered choice guided by the fact that all those extra needles are of inherent interest?  That’s a fine point if people behaved like a computer, which they don’t. The analogy instead is more like a steam engine, which has to get fired up before it can ever get going, and often can’t stop when it does. Similarly, when we are faced with a demand for performance, the mind and body has to prepare itself or get ‘fired up’ for performance, but stopping is another matter. Get in place to run a race, and your muscles will tense to prepare you for a quick release, see a plate of tasty food, and you will salivate to prepare for consuming the food, and perceive a lot of novel and salient information, and your attention will perk up so you can process that information efficiently. But when we pay attention to novel information, do you stop when you’ve had enough? Well no. That’s because perking attention is not a just a cognitive activity, but an affective one as well, as our ability to consume information efficiently depends upon a non-conscious reason to want to stay on task, and that’s where affect comes in. In other words, to process information effectively, we must ‘want’ to do so, and wanting ‘feels good’. Thus to keep on task, our brains prejudice our immediate behavior in service of an immediate goal, namely processing important information in a timely way, and it does so by temporarily skewing the momentary importance or ‘incentive salience’ of behavior.  The brain does this by releasing the neuro-chemical or ‘neuro-modulator’ dopamine that modulates or changes (in this case increases) the rate of firing of arrays of neurons in the brain. Dopamine increases the efficiency of learning, increases alertness, and causes a positive affective state that spurs us on. Dopamine is the source of the common temptations that cause us stray from our long term goals. The temptations of sex, eating, and other pleasures all implicate dopamine activity. However, as the word temptation implies we normally do not conflate the momentary temptation to eat with the long term value of eating reasonably. In other words, temptation represents the urge to take our pleasures in the moment without regard to their long term advisability. Moreover, temptation can grow if we perceive more of what we want, thus we are more tempted to eat when we are confronted with a sumptuous buffet, have sex when we look at pornography, etc.  Similarly, when we are presented with a rich informative environment such as the web, the temptation to remain in that environment increases, and we end up overstaying our welcome on sites that remain affectively important even after their logical importance wanes.  The negative results are manifold, and result in regret and unhappiness over time ill spent, a disruption of attention and memory due to constant distractive interruptions (e.g. checking email or social media), and the anxiety and tension due to the constant indecision and confusion this brings to daily decision making.

So how can you deal with this problem? The procedures are simple, starting with a radical reduction in distraction, but first you need a good explanation, or understanding, hence this book. As with any important problem, explanation is key, for without it one can be easily swayed by rationalization, demagoguery, and outright fakery. In other words, my argument must not just seem right, it must be right, and to be right it must be clear, concrete, and above all easily testable or refutable. That is the intended purpose and lesson of this book.