Instant, not insight
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Silicon Valley's obsession with “fast” and “more” (news headlines, social media updates, gov't comm's) isn't leading us to better perspectives on the world, says LA Review of Books. Rather, this “onslaught of information” overwhelms and makes many prioritize hyperrealism over reality.
HOW MUCH BETTER is the world since the arrival of what Nicholas Carr calls our modern “technologies of connection”—cell phones, personal computers, the internet, social media, artificial intelligence? As we watch these systems undermine democracy, flood our lives with misinformation and deepfakes, transform our children into screen-obsessed zombies, and threaten to eradicate us entirely, we might be tempted to respond with a hollow laugh. …
Carr established himself as an astute commentator on information technology in his 2010 book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, in which he argued that Google and the internet are, in the words of his formative essay in The Atlantic, “making us stupid.” …
To understand what went wrong, Carr takes the long view. Telecommunication in the literal sense—near-instantaneous communication over long distances—is an ancient dream. …
The central issue, Carr implies, is that we have tended to suppose that new technologies for communication are either neutral media for making what was once laborious and expensive cheaper and easier, or positive developments that, by putting us ever more in touch with people and information, lubricate social discourse and make us more rational. …
[C]ommunication media do much more than channel information. They establish social norms and beliefs, mediate praise and blame, and establish power hierarchies. As a result, says Carr, “every communication medium is political.” It determines what we see and know, and shapes it in the process. …
At root, we’re the problem. Our minds don’t simply distill useful knowledge from a mass of raw data. They use shortcuts, rules of thumb, heuristic hacks—which is how we were able to think fast enough to survive on the savage savanna. We pay heed, for example, to what we experience most often. “Repetition is, in the human mind, a proxy for facticity,” says Carr. “What’s true is what comes out of the machine most often.”
[B]eside this “fast thinking” module, we also have a “slow thinking” one that is more deliberative and weighs the evidence more carefully. But social media are designed to undermine this mode by eliciting “fast” responses, which sends us seeking the next and the next dopamine hits. Take the retweet button, invented by a Twitter team led by developer Chris Wetherell. By making it so easy to amplify posts, perhaps to thousands or millions at once, without needing to ask if the posts are true (compared to, say, passing them on to friends in a phone call), the function is a megaphone for misinformation. …
The central problem, however, is that an onslaught of information—of everything, all at once—flattens all sense of proportion. … “[S]ocial media renders category errors obsolete because it renders categories obsolete. All information belongs to a single category—it’s all ‘content.’” And very often, the content that matters is decided in the currency of commerce: content is “bad” when it harms profits.
This flattening reconfigures our world. Electronic media “destroy the specialness of place and time,” wrote professor of communication Joshua Meyrowitz in 1985. … Cultural philosopher Jean Baudrillard called a world that had dissolved into information and communication “hyperreality.” Nothing is “real” any more that is not a part of that world. …
We have evolved to seek, says Carr, but with the internet, there is no natural curb to that desire, and never any sense of satiation. Reality can’t compete with the internet’s steady diet of novelty and shallow, ephemeral rewards. The ease of the user interface, congenial even to babies, creates no opportunity for what writer Antón Barba-Kay calls “disciplined acculturation.” …
We can’t change or constrain the tech, says Carr, but we can change ourselves. We can choose to reject the hyperreal for the material. We can follow Samuel Johnson’s refutation of immaterialism by “kicking the stone,” reminding ourselves of what is real.
Read the whole thing here.
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