Awareness | Debate | Action
NO MORE FEEDS PLEASE! How abundant information is making us fat.
by Tad Toulis
Lately I've been unusually cranky: It may be the frustrations of a difficult marketplace where economic adversity forces one to tolerate the otherwise intolerable. It may be the extra hours of summer sunlight here in the Pacific Northwest, which brings about an initial euphoria that can descend into mania. But with a gnawing conviction, I've come to believe that this crankiness is the physiological manifestation of an uneasy realization: there is too much opinion in the world and precious little fact. For the past two months I've found my idle thoughts converging on three disjointed but persistent topics: food, information and society. With time these three topics have paired themselves off into a set of relatively stable couplings: Food and Information, Information and Production, and Production and Society.
Cheap Tasty and Vacant
A few months back I was at a conference in Portland where one of the speakers made reference to Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food, reframing the title as In Defense of Product. I was so taken by the idea that I walked out of the conference, crossed the street to Powel's and bought a copy. I wont go into a lengthy explanation of that book here, but for those who haven't read it, Pollan's book builds upon his eater's manifesto: Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Within this straightforward statement resides an insight relevant to any contemporary consumer dynamic: scale your consumption to a level that's sustainable. I explored the potential implications of this manifesto for product designers in a recent post entitled Featurism is Fat: Lessons on consumerism from the organic food movement. What's particularly intriguing in Pollan's book is the back-story he builds around nutritional science. Throughout the book Pollan describes how the mass marketing of foods in terms of nutritional value helped industrial agriculture productize produce, ultimately reaching its zenith in an American diet that is chemically rich but nutritionally vacant.
All around us tastier, sweeter and starchier content awaits--ready to be ingested faster and more readily than ever before. Raising the question, if nutritional tampering set in motion a growing inventory of health issues, where will content snacking lead us?
And it's there, in the systemic productization of an organic thing, that the first pairing crops up: Food and Information. Information, like food, serves the dual purpose of providing nourishment and reinforcing cultural values. No one would argue the role food plays in this regard, but Information, acting as it does as subjective and objective chronicler, serves the same function. Pollan argues that industrial agriculture seized upon 'nutritional equivalents' because it offered a production-ready method by which foods could be delivered over great distances. Manufactured foods, whether packaged or farmed, stayed tastier for longer, traveled well and cost significantly less. But this ever available, ever cheapening food supply came at a cost--you had to alter those foods to mainstream them. One could argue a similar mainstreaming is happening with information. The information economy and its ever-accelerating delivery system have rendered the consumption of content much more than a metaphor. All around us tastier, sweeter and starchier content awaits--ready to be ingested faster and more readily than ever before. Raising the question, if nutritional tampering set in motion a growing inventory of health issues, where will content snacking lead us?
High Carb Thinking
Contemporary culture's seemingly inexhaustible appetite for content brings us to the second coupling: Information and Production. Fueled by social media sites and ever-cheaper devices, information production has continued unabated over the course of the present recession. To be sure, the widening array of voices that feed this dynamic and its democratizing effect are fantastic achievements, but undermining these accomplishments are the less admirable effects of a 24/7 media culture run rampant. Simply put, there's too much bad stuff out there; too many points of view and way too much noise. In our ever compressed lives, where tweets and posts compete tirelessly for our attention, this hallmark of contemporary life threatens to invite a pan-global case of attention deficit disorder the likes of which no Ritalin prescription could combat.
In the US years of industrial agriculture famously reduced cost to the point where the average person in North America spent less than 10% of their disposable income feeding themselves; A fact that would have been unthinkable in our grandparent's generation.
Cheap and plentiful, the contemporary information economy mirrors the food economy in yet another way: over production. Both markets, having stabilized supply, now offer us product at little to no price. In the US years of industrial agriculture famously reduced cost to the point where--until very recently - the average person in North America spent less than 10% of their disposable income feeding themselves; A fact that would have been unthinkable in our grandparent's generation. With information the corollary is a marketplace where abundance exerts an 'inexorable downward pressure on the prices of all things made of ideas'. If you believe Chris Anderson, this newfound abundance stands poised to deliver us a new era of opportunity. But couldn't this abundance just as easily lead us toward waste and indifference? A circumstance diametrically at odds with the challenges presently facing the world we inhabit. Just because something is free doesn't mean it comes at no cost. Food comes cheap in America, but by some estimates we waste roughly 29 million tons of food each year, the disposal of which costs the economy approximately $100 billion annually. Adding insult to injury, rather than feeding the hungry, this food typically ends up in landfill where it generates methane gas further contributing to global warming. There is it seems, always a cost.
And so it goes with information. In collecting thoughts for this post I came across a recent On the Media interview with John McIntyre, former copy editor at the Baltimore Sun. Reflecting on an apparent surge in newspaper errors, McIntyre observed: "They [newspapers] are desperate to have enough reporters to generate enough material, and have decided [to] sacrifice quality and accuracy in order to produce enough material." Referring to new media specifically, McIntyre noted: "Readers on the Internet don't expect things to be accurate or very well done and, therefore… are used to tolerating a much higher volume of errors…you can sacrifice the quality on the Web and it doesn't mean that much." Whether it's the electrical power needed to exchange our 'free' content or the societal cost of an ill informed public, our low-to-no cost information diet is making us sick.
Certified Organic
This brings us to the third and final coupling: Production and Society. In a society where we regularly ingest ideas and concepts prepared by anonymous and unaffiliated parties, what becomes the implicit contract between producer and consumer? What assures us that that bottle of milk on the shelf isn't Plaster of Paris? That Google bombing didn't lead you to that page at the top of you browser? Written in 2007, Andrew Keen's controversial The Cult of the Amateur, warned against a potential crisis of trust brought about by our attraction to all things amateur--specifically the growing appeal of "superficial observation over deep analysis." The web's inherent preference for popularity threatens to engorge us with 'opinion' while objective facts and the desire for them increasingly assume a rarefied air bordering on pretention. This fact should worry us, for it prescribes a market where facts subject to the rules of scarcity, one where access and availability take on age-old patterns of elitism and privilege.
The temptation of easy ideas that reinforce our individual preferences is far too great to let it go unchallenged; The satisfaction of indulgently broadcasting our every thought and action too compelling.
In the US, where politicians have made generous careers out of playing the culture card, you can be sure that any attempt to safeguard 'quality' information will prove easy fodder for further divisiveness. But contemplating these ideas I cannot help but feel that reflective thought is in jeopardy. The temptation of easy ideas that reinforce our individual preferences is far too great to let it go unchallenged; The satisfaction of indulgently broadcasting our every thought and action too compelling. But as our better selves already know, what is easy to do rarely proves the best course of action; What is readily available, often not the best we can get. In his inauguration speech Obama challenged us to move beyond our 'collective failure to make hard choices.' The growing sweep of fast content that envelops us requires no less; especially in a time when we face such great domestic, geo-political and environmental challenges.
Just as the organic food movement heralded a coming crisis in the industrial agriculture model, a subtle but persistent slow thought movement seems to be taking shape. In a piece for the Guardian posted in early July author Nick Laird made a tentative case for a slow language movement, citing his growing inability to 'engage with syntax of any complexity and subtlety.' I don't know where this unfolding discourse will lead, but as I edit my Twitter 'following/follower' list down to the bone, judiciously limit LinkedIn requests, defensively review friend requests on FaceBook and offensively turn off my iPhone--I know that to find it and to hear it, I'll need to work for it. And that thought brings with it all the impending satisfaction of a good meal.
Originally posted on CORE77
Lately I've been unusually cranky: It may be the frustrations of a difficult marketplace where economic adversity forces one to tolerate the otherwise intolerable. It may be the extra hours of summer sunlight here in the Pacific Northwest, which brings about an initial euphoria that can descend into mania. But with a gnawing conviction, I've come to believe that this crankiness is the physiological manifestation of an uneasy realization: there is too much opinion in the world and precious little fact. For the past two months I've found my idle thoughts converging on three disjointed but persistent topics: food, information and society. With time these three topics have paired themselves off into a set of relatively stable couplings: Food and Information, Information and Production, and Production and Society.
Cheap Tasty and Vacant
A few months back I was at a conference in Portland where one of the speakers made reference to Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food, reframing the title as In Defense of Product. I was so taken by the idea that I walked out of the conference, crossed the street to Powel's and bought a copy. I wont go into a lengthy explanation of that book here, but for those who haven't read it, Pollan's book builds upon his eater's manifesto: Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Within this straightforward statement resides an insight relevant to any contemporary consumer dynamic: scale your consumption to a level that's sustainable. I explored the potential implications of this manifesto for product designers in a recent post entitled Featurism is Fat: Lessons on consumerism from the organic food movement. What's particularly intriguing in Pollan's book is the back-story he builds around nutritional science. Throughout the book Pollan describes how the mass marketing of foods in terms of nutritional value helped industrial agriculture productize produce, ultimately reaching its zenith in an American diet that is chemically rich but nutritionally vacant.
All around us tastier, sweeter and starchier content awaits--ready to be ingested faster and more readily than ever before. Raising the question, if nutritional tampering set in motion a growing inventory of health issues, where will content snacking lead us?
And it's there, in the systemic productization of an organic thing, that the first pairing crops up: Food and Information. Information, like food, serves the dual purpose of providing nourishment and reinforcing cultural values. No one would argue the role food plays in this regard, but Information, acting as it does as subjective and objective chronicler, serves the same function. Pollan argues that industrial agriculture seized upon 'nutritional equivalents' because it offered a production-ready method by which foods could be delivered over great distances. Manufactured foods, whether packaged or farmed, stayed tastier for longer, traveled well and cost significantly less. But this ever available, ever cheapening food supply came at a cost--you had to alter those foods to mainstream them. One could argue a similar mainstreaming is happening with information. The information economy and its ever-accelerating delivery system have rendered the consumption of content much more than a metaphor. All around us tastier, sweeter and starchier content awaits--ready to be ingested faster and more readily than ever before. Raising the question, if nutritional tampering set in motion a growing inventory of health issues, where will content snacking lead us?
High Carb Thinking
Contemporary culture's seemingly inexhaustible appetite for content brings us to the second coupling: Information and Production. Fueled by social media sites and ever-cheaper devices, information production has continued unabated over the course of the present recession. To be sure, the widening array of voices that feed this dynamic and its democratizing effect are fantastic achievements, but undermining these accomplishments are the less admirable effects of a 24/7 media culture run rampant. Simply put, there's too much bad stuff out there; too many points of view and way too much noise. In our ever compressed lives, where tweets and posts compete tirelessly for our attention, this hallmark of contemporary life threatens to invite a pan-global case of attention deficit disorder the likes of which no Ritalin prescription could combat.
In the US years of industrial agriculture famously reduced cost to the point where the average person in North America spent less than 10% of their disposable income feeding themselves; A fact that would have been unthinkable in our grandparent's generation.
Cheap and plentiful, the contemporary information economy mirrors the food economy in yet another way: over production. Both markets, having stabilized supply, now offer us product at little to no price. In the US years of industrial agriculture famously reduced cost to the point where--until very recently - the average person in North America spent less than 10% of their disposable income feeding themselves; A fact that would have been unthinkable in our grandparent's generation. With information the corollary is a marketplace where abundance exerts an 'inexorable downward pressure on the prices of all things made of ideas'. If you believe Chris Anderson, this newfound abundance stands poised to deliver us a new era of opportunity. But couldn't this abundance just as easily lead us toward waste and indifference? A circumstance diametrically at odds with the challenges presently facing the world we inhabit. Just because something is free doesn't mean it comes at no cost. Food comes cheap in America, but by some estimates we waste roughly 29 million tons of food each year, the disposal of which costs the economy approximately $100 billion annually. Adding insult to injury, rather than feeding the hungry, this food typically ends up in landfill where it generates methane gas further contributing to global warming. There is it seems, always a cost.
And so it goes with information. In collecting thoughts for this post I came across a recent On the Media interview with John McIntyre, former copy editor at the Baltimore Sun. Reflecting on an apparent surge in newspaper errors, McIntyre observed: "They [newspapers] are desperate to have enough reporters to generate enough material, and have decided [to] sacrifice quality and accuracy in order to produce enough material." Referring to new media specifically, McIntyre noted: "Readers on the Internet don't expect things to be accurate or very well done and, therefore… are used to tolerating a much higher volume of errors…you can sacrifice the quality on the Web and it doesn't mean that much." Whether it's the electrical power needed to exchange our 'free' content or the societal cost of an ill informed public, our low-to-no cost information diet is making us sick.
Certified Organic
This brings us to the third and final coupling: Production and Society. In a society where we regularly ingest ideas and concepts prepared by anonymous and unaffiliated parties, what becomes the implicit contract between producer and consumer? What assures us that that bottle of milk on the shelf isn't Plaster of Paris? That Google bombing didn't lead you to that page at the top of you browser? Written in 2007, Andrew Keen's controversial The Cult of the Amateur, warned against a potential crisis of trust brought about by our attraction to all things amateur--specifically the growing appeal of "superficial observation over deep analysis." The web's inherent preference for popularity threatens to engorge us with 'opinion' while objective facts and the desire for them increasingly assume a rarefied air bordering on pretention. This fact should worry us, for it prescribes a market where facts subject to the rules of scarcity, one where access and availability take on age-old patterns of elitism and privilege.
The temptation of easy ideas that reinforce our individual preferences is far too great to let it go unchallenged; The satisfaction of indulgently broadcasting our every thought and action too compelling.
In the US, where politicians have made generous careers out of playing the culture card, you can be sure that any attempt to safeguard 'quality' information will prove easy fodder for further divisiveness. But contemplating these ideas I cannot help but feel that reflective thought is in jeopardy. The temptation of easy ideas that reinforce our individual preferences is far too great to let it go unchallenged; The satisfaction of indulgently broadcasting our every thought and action too compelling. But as our better selves already know, what is easy to do rarely proves the best course of action; What is readily available, often not the best we can get. In his inauguration speech Obama challenged us to move beyond our 'collective failure to make hard choices.' The growing sweep of fast content that envelops us requires no less; especially in a time when we face such great domestic, geo-political and environmental challenges.
Just as the organic food movement heralded a coming crisis in the industrial agriculture model, a subtle but persistent slow thought movement seems to be taking shape. In a piece for the Guardian posted in early July author Nick Laird made a tentative case for a slow language movement, citing his growing inability to 'engage with syntax of any complexity and subtlety.' I don't know where this unfolding discourse will lead, but as I edit my Twitter 'following/follower' list down to the bone, judiciously limit LinkedIn requests, defensively review friend requests on FaceBook and offensively turn off my iPhone--I know that to find it and to hear it, I'll need to work for it. And that thought brings with it all the impending satisfaction of a good meal.
Originally posted on CORE77
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Comment by Cromag on August 8, 2009 at 12:47am
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Andrew Keen reference above
The Cult of the Amateur
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI Published: June 29, 2007
Digital utopians have heralded the dawn of an era in which Web 2.0 — distinguished by a new generation of participatory sites like MySpace.com and YouTube.com, which emphasize user-generated content, social networking and interactive sharing — ushers in the democratization of the world: more information, more perspectives, more opinions, more everything, and most of it without filters or fees. Yet as the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Andrew Keen points out in his provocative new book, “The Cult of the Amateur,” Web 2.0 has a dark side as well.
Mr. Keen argues that “what the Web 2.0 revolution is really delivering is superficial observations of the world around us rather than deep analysis, shrill opinion rather than considered judgment.” In his view Web 2.0 is changing the cultural landscape and not for the better. By undermining mainstream media and intellectual property rights, he says, it is creating a world in which we will “live to see the bulk of our music coming from amateur garage bands, our movies and television from glorified YouTubes, and our news made up of hyperactive celebrity gossip, served up as mere dressing for advertising.” This is what happens, he suggests, “when ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule.”
This book, which grew out of a controversial essay published last year by The Weekly Standard, is a shrewdly argued jeremiad against the digerati effort to dethrone cultural and political gatekeepers and replace experts with the “wisdom of the crowd.” Although Mr. Keen wanders off his subject in the later chapters of the book — to deliver some generic, moralistic rants against Internet evils like online gambling and online pornography — he writes with acuity and passion about the consequences of a world in which the lines between fact and opinion, informed expertise and amateurish speculation are willfully blurred.
For one thing, Mr. Keen says, “history has proven that the crowd is not often very wise,” embracing unwise ideas like “slavery, infanticide, George W. Bush’s war in Iraq, Britney Spears.” The crowd created the tech bubble of the 1990s, just as it created the disastrous Tulipmania that swept the Netherlands in the 17th century.
Mr. Keen also points out that Google search results — which answer “search queries not with what is most true or most reliable, but merely what is most popular” — can be manipulated by “Google bombing” (which “involves simply linking a large number of sites to a certain page” to “raise the ranking of any given site in Google’s search results”). And he cites a recent Wall Street Journal article reporting that hot lists on social networking Web sites are often shaped by a small number of users: that at Digg.com, which has 900,000 registered users, 30 people were responsible at one point for submitting one-third of the postings on the home page; and at Netscape.com, a single user was behind 217 stories over a two-week period, or 13 percent of all stories that reached the most popular list in that period.
Because Web 2.0 celebrates the “noble amateur” over the expert, and because many search engines and Web sites tout popularity rather than reliability, Mr. Keen notes, it’s easy for misinformation and rumors to proliferate in cyberspace. For instance, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia (which relies upon volunteer editors and contributors) gets way more traffic than the Web site run by Encyclopedia Britannica (which relies upon experts and scholars), even though the interactive format employed by Wikipedia opens it to postings that are inaccurate, unverified, even downright fraudulent. This year it was revealed that a contributor using the name Essjay, who had edited thousands of Wikipedia articles and was once one of the few people given the authority to arbitrate disputes between writers, was a 24-year-old named Ryan Jordan, not the tenured professor he claimed to be.
Since contributors to Wikipedia and YouTube are frequently anonymous, it’s hard for users to be certain of their identity — or their agendas. Postings about political candidates, for instance, can be made by opponents disguising their motives; and propaganda can be passed off as news or information. For that matter, as Mr. Keen points out, the idea of objectivity is becoming increasingly passé in the relativistic realm of the Web, where bloggers cherry-pick information and promote speculation and spin as fact. Whereas historians and journalists traditionally strived to deliver the best available truth possible, many bloggers revel in their own subjectivity, and many Web 2.0 users simply use the Net, in Mr. Keen’s words, to confirm their “own partisan views and link to others with the same ideologies.” What’s more, as mutually agreed upon facts become more elusive, informed debate about important social and political issues of the day becomes more difficult as well.
Although Mr. Keen’s objections to the publishing and distribution tools the Web provides to aspiring artists and writers sound churlish and elitist — he calls publish-on-demand services “just cheaper, more accessible versions of vanity presses where the untalented go to purchase the veneer of publication” — he is eloquent on the fallout that free, user-generated materials is having on traditional media.
Mr. Keen argues that the democratized Web’s penchant for mash-ups, remixes and cut-and-paste jobs threaten not just copyright laws but also the very ideas of authorship and intellectual property. He observes that as advertising dollars migrate from newspapers, magazines and television news to the Web, organizations with the expertise and resources to finance investigative and foreign reporting face more and more business challenges. And he suggests that as CD sales fall (in the face of digital piracy and single-song downloads) and the music business becomes increasingly embattled, new artists will discover that Internet fame does not translate into the sort of sales or worldwide recognition enjoyed by earlier generations of musicians.
“What you may not realize is that what is free is actually costing us a fortune,” Mr. Keen writes. “The new winners — Google, YouTube, MySpace, Craigslist, and the hundreds of start-ups hungry for a piece of the Web 2.0 pie — are unlikely to fill the shoes of the industries they are helping to undermine, in terms of products produced, jobs created, revenue generated or benefits conferred. By stealing away our eyeballs, the blogs and wikis are decimating the publishing, music and news-gathering industries that created the original content those Web sites ‘aggregate.’ Our culture is essentially cannibalizing its young, destroying the very sources of the content they crave.”
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