Rethinking Information and The Attention Economy
Posted Jul 07, 2007
As a human being who consumes data all day every day like it ain't no thing, I can testify to the fact that it leads to mental illness. As Jeff Wells puts it: "Language, being a virus, occasionally makes me sick." (Replace "occasionally" with "constantly," though.)It's been curious to see a thread emerging this week from dozens of sources: maybe I need to re-think the value of information. My first sniff was on the toilet, reading through Mark C. Taylor's book "The Moment of Complexity
"Another source of confusion is that we generally do not think of information as a liability. We pay to have newspapers delivered, not taken away. Intuitively, the record of past actions appears to be valuable (or at worst, useless) commodity. Perhaps the increasing awareness of environmental pollution and the information explosion brought on by computers have made the idea that information can have a negative value seem more natural now than it would have seemed earlier in the century."
I am a brutal and vicious human being, in terms of my relationship with data. I interrogate it, I demand that it prove itself useful. I also despair at the reality of the situation: that I evaluate the information I consume based upon previous conclusions and information. Most of that stuff is probably bullshit, probably wrong, probably second-hand opinion I never even realized I was absorbing or emulating.
If there were something you could take after experiencing a painful or traumatic event that would permanently weaken your memory of what had just happened, would you take it? As correspondent Lesley Stahl reports, it's an idea that may not be so far off, and that has some critics alarmed, and some trauma victims filled with hope.
So periodic and catastrophic updates are unavoidable, then. When I was younger, I assumed that the best approach was to completely destroy and rebuild my assumptions and "paradigms" as often as possible, but this proved to be exhausting. Although I can't say for sure it was bad for my mental health, I do realize it made me insufferable to be around.
Experiments done in 1927 by Bluma Zeigarnik showed that we remember interrupted tasks best. The reason for this is that the tension created by unfinished tasks helps us to remember; it is not just the most rewarding experiences that we remember best.
Adbusters introduced me to the concept of a "mental ecology" -- equally effective is the metaphor of watching your brain diet, and considering what you put into your head before you consume it. Then again, you can read up on Oreos before you get stoned and eat the whole box, but if you see an advertising billboard it's already too late. There are solutions to this, although they're mostly illegal.
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