{"id":20110,"date":"2015-06-16T07:00:18","date_gmt":"2015-06-16T11:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=20110"},"modified":"2015-06-16T10:29:27","modified_gmt":"2015-06-16T14:29:27","slug":"infoguilt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2015\/06\/16\/infoguilt\/","title":{"rendered":"InfoGuilt"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"5366688138_743dabd609_o\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Atrocities in Eritrea atop my Twitter feed. A few tweets below that, police violence against an innocent African American girl at a pool party. Below that, the story of a teen unfairly held at Rikers Island for three years, who eventually killed himself. Below that, news about the seemingly unending bombing campaign in Yemen. Below that, several tweets about the Iraq war and climate change\u2014two longtime staples of my timeline. It reminds me of the writer Teju Cole exclaiming on Twitter last summer<\/a> that \u201cwe\u2019re not evolving emotional filters fast enough to deal with the efficiency with which bad news now reaches us\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n

This torrent of news about war, injustice, and suffering is something many of us experience online today, be it on Facebook, Twitter, in our inboxes, or elsewhere. But I wonder about the \u2018evolutionary\u2019 framing of this problem\u2014do we really need to develop some new kinds of emotional or social or technical filters for the bad news that engulfs us? Has it gotten that bad?<\/p>\n

As it turns out, it has always already gotten that bad. Media critics like Neil Postman having been making arguments about the deleterious effects of having too much mass-mediated information for decades now. Although his classic Amusing Ourselves to Death<\/em><\/a> (1985) was written primarily as a critique of television, contemporary critics often apply Postman\u2019s theories to digital media. One recent piece in Salon<\/em><\/a> labelled Postman \u201cthe man who predicted the Internet\u201d and suggested that today \u201cthe people asking the important questions about where American society is going are taking a page from him.\u201d Indeed, Postman identified the central problem of all post-typographic media, beginning with the telegraph, as one of information overload. According to Postman, \u201cthe situation created by telegraphy, and then exacerbated by later technologies, made the relationship between information and action both abstract and remote. For the first time in human history, people were faced with the problem of information glut.\u201d For Postman, typography\u2019s alteration of the \u201cinformation-action ratio\u201d associated with older communication technologies created a \u201cdiminished social and political potency.\u201d In oral and print cultures, \u201cinformation derives its importance from the possibilities of action\u201d but in the era of electronic media we live in a dystopian \u201cpeek-a-boo world\u201d where information appears from across the globe without context or connection to our daily lives. It \u201cgives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action.\u201d<\/p>\n

Put in these terms, one can understand the appeal of Postman\u2019s ideas for the digital era, in which a feeling of being overloaded with information surely persists. Even before the Internet, \u201call we had to do was go to the library to feel overwhelmed by more than we could possibly absorb.\u201d But as Mark Andrejevic reminds us in his book, Infoglut<\/em><\/a>, \u201cNow this excess confronts us at every turn: in the devices we use to work, to communicate with one another, to entertain ourselves.\u201d And as Cole\u2019s tweets make plain, the tension caused by too much information can be particularly acute when it comes in the form of bad news. Is it safe to say, then, that Internet has further ruptured the information-action ratio in the ways suggested by Postman?<\/p>\n

I want to argue against such a view. For one thing, Postman\u2019s information-action ratio appears to privilege media that provide less <\/em>information, and information with easily actionable ramifications. As a criticism, this doesn\u2019t mesh with the sensibilities of either media producers or consumers, who have sought out more information from more people and places since at least the advent of typography. Such an ideal also would seem to privilege simple news stories over complex ones, since the action one can take in response to a simple story is much clearer than a complex one. Indeed, Postman mockingly asked his readers \u201cwhat steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war?\u201d But do the scale and complexity of these issues mean one should not want to know about them? Of course not. And arguing against the public consumption of such complex, thought-provoking stories seems wildly inconsistent for a book that later bemoaned the fact that television news shows were merely \u201cfor entertainment, not education, reflection or catharsis.\u201d<\/p>\n

But perhaps there is simply a threshold quantity of information beyond which human consciousness can\u2019t keep up. This concern has animated much contemporary criticism of the Internet\u2019s epistemological effects, as in Nicholas Carr\u2019s 2008 essay \u201cIs Google Making Us Stupid?\u201d<\/a> The piece began with Carr worrying about his own reading habits: \u201cmy concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages….\u201d Carr quickly blamed the Internet for his newfound distraction. \u201cWhat the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation….\u201d<\/p>\n

Amazingly though, Carr\u2019s capacity for deep reading had somehow managed to persist throughout the age of television, in contrast to Postman\u2019s predictions about that medium\u2019s deleterious effects. So while media critics of every age tend to make these sort of technologically determinist criticisms, the question really ought to be reframed as one concerning social norms. Critics like Carr may talk of the brain\u2019s \u201cplasticity,\u201d such that it can be rewired based on repeated exposure to hyperlinks and algorithms, but they, like Postman, don\u2019t address why that rewiring wouldn\u2019t necessarily entail the synthesis of old and new epistemologies, rather than the destruction of one by the other. How else to explain the fact that Carr\u2019s own mental capacities flourished in a televisual age that was once similarly bemoaned by its critics? What we\u2019re left with, then, is a way of reading technological panics like his and Postman\u2019s as evidence of the shifting norms concerning communication technologies.<\/p>\n

Shifting to normative, rather than technologically determinist, understandings of information overload recasts the problem of bad news in sociological and historical terms. Luc Boltanski\u2019s Distant Suffering<\/em><\/a> is a social history of the moral problem posed by the mass media\u2019s representation of the suffering of distant others. When one knows that others are suffering nearby, one\u2019s moral obligation is clearly to help them. But as Boltanski explains, when one contemplates the suffering of others from afar, moral obligations become harder to discern. In this scenario, the \u201cleast unacceptable\u201d option is to at least make one\u2019s voice heard. As Boltanski put it:<\/p>\n

It is by speaking up that the spectator can maintain his integrity when, brought face to face with suffering, he is called upon to act in a situation in which direct action is difficult or impossible. Now even if this speech is initially no more than an internal whisper to himself\u2026 none the less in principle it contains a requirement of publicity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There are echoes here of the information-action ratio concept, but the problem posed by this information is not the amount but its specific content. Good news and lighthearted entertainment don\u2019t really pose a moral or ethical problem for spectators, nor do fictional depictions of suffering. But information about real human suffering does pose the problem of action as a moral one for the spectator.<\/p>\n

This moral dilemma certainly didn\u2019t originate with the telegram, much less the television or the Internet. Rather, knowledge of distant others\u2019 suffering came to be seen as morally problematic with the growth of newspapers and the press. But the Internet does, I think, tend to shake up these norms, partly because it changes the nature of public speech. In Postman\u2019s terms, the Internet alters the action side of the information-action ratio. Call it slacktivism or clicktivism or simply chalk it up to the affordances of communication in a networked world, but Boltanski\u2019s \u201cinternal whisper to himself\u201d is no longer internal for many of us. At the very least, when confronted with bad news, we can pass on the spectacle by tweeting, blogging, pinning, or posting it in ways that are immediately quite public and also immediately tailored to further sharing. Each time I read a tweet I am confronted with the question of whether I should retweet or reply to it. This becomes a miniature ethical and aesthetic referendum on every tweet about suffering and misfortune\u2014Is the issue serious enough? Will my Twitter followers care? Do I trust the source of this info? Is there another angle that the author of the tweet has not considered?\u2014although I do this mental work quite quickly and almost unthinkingly at times. The same is true for my email inbox, flooded with entreaties for donations to worthy causes or requests to add my name to a petition against some terrible injustice. Of course, humanitarianism and political activism thrived before the Internet, so the issue here is not that the Internet has suddenly overloaded us with information about bad news, but has increased the amount of direct actions we might take as a result. Each one of these actions is easy to do, but they add up to new and slightly different expectations.<\/p>\n

This culminates in what I\u2019m calling infoguilt<\/em>. This term has been used sparingly in popular parlance, and its only scholarly use is in a 1998 book called Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace<\/em><\/a>. Author James J. O\u2019Donnell suggested that \u201cwhat is perceived as infoglut is actually infoguilt\u2014the sense that I should be seeking more.\u201d In O\u2019Donnell\u2019s conception guilt comes from not reading all that one could on a subject, or seeking out all available information. This doesn\u2019t seem to me as potent a force as the guilt that comes from the kinds of overwhelming exposure to bad news and distant suffering discussed here. Guilt ought to be reserved for situations in which one\u2019s moral worth is called into question, and as Boltanski pointed out, the spectacle of distant suffering \u201cmay be\u2026 the only spectacle capable of posing a specifically moral dilemma to someone exposed to it.\u201d A more relevant definition of infoguilt ought to refer, then, to the negative conception of self that comes from not responding to the moral or emotional demands of bad news.<\/p>\n

This guilt certainly generates a kind of reflexivity about one\u2019s position as a spectator\u2014how can I prioritize my time, resources, and emotions\u2014and in this way it may surely feel like we have too much information and not enough action. But I, for one, don\u2019t think that feeling is a bad thing. After all, it hasn\u2019t translated to a retreat from humanitarianism and charity\u2014quite the opposite. Rates of charitable giving online have skyrocketed, and despite a serious dip in charitable donations after the 2008 financial crisis, American giving as a whole has risen continuously over the past four years<\/a>, and is projected to continue to rise in 2015 and 2016 as well<\/a>. At the very least it does not appear that the problem of infoguilt contributes to what has been deemed \u201ccompassion fatigue<\/a>.\u201d Instead, the guilt we feel is precisely a marker of a continued belief in the value of compassion and an internalization of shame when we fail to act with enough compassion for the many distant others who are now only a click away.<\/p>\n

Still, I don\u2019t want to just dismiss infoguilt as merely a trivial first world problem. It is, of course, a symptom of a deeply unjust world where such a surplus of pain and suffering confronts the most comfortable of us every day across the globe. And I don\u2019t have the answer for the appropriate ways we should respond to all of the misfortune that confronts us everyday online. But I do think we need to fight back against the notion that this is a technological problem. Because big tech companies are quite willing to solve the problem of infoguilt for us with algorithmic curation of the news we receive. As more and more of our news comes to us filtered through Facebook and Twitter, algorithms could reduce the emotional strain of bad news by limiting our exposure to it without us even knowing. This begs the question, as Mark Andrejevic<\/a> put it \u201cwhat happens when we offload our \u2018knowing\u2019 onto the database (or algorithm) because the new forms of knowledge available are \u2018too big\u2019 for us to comprehend?\u201d Facebook has already shown that it can subtly improve or depress our moods<\/a> by shifting the content of our news feeds. And Zeynep Tufecki has written about the ways that Facebook\u2019s algorithm inadvertently suppressed information about the protests in Ferguson<\/a> and the brutal police response to them in the first hours of that nascent social movement. If we solve infoguilt with technological fixes like algorithmic filtering, it will likely be at tremendous cost to what\u2019s left of our democratic public sphere.<\/p>\n

As Andrejevic again explains:<\/p>\n

The dystopian version of information glut anticipates a world in which control over\u2026 information\u2026 is concentrated in the hands of the few who use it to sort, manage, and manipulate. Those without access to the database are left with the \u201cpoor person\u2019s\u201d strategies for cutting through the clutter: gut instinct, affective response, and \u201cthin-slicing\u201d (making a snap decision based on a tiny fraction of the evidence).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is, to a great extent, how we struggle with infoguilt today. We feel the pain of being unable to respond and the guilt of living in comfort and safety while others suffer, and we make snap judgments and gut decisions about what information to let through our emotional filters, and what actions we can spare amidst the ever growing demands of work, family and social life in an always-connected present. But given the available alternatives, let\u2019s continue to struggle through our infoguilt, keep talking it out, and not cede these moral, ethical, and normative questions\u2014over which we do have agency\u2014to opaque technologies promising the comforts of a bygone, mythologized era. In the same way that activists are working to change the norms about trolling and actively creating safer spaces online for women, people of color, and other oppressed peoples, we can work to develop a moral language to understand our online obligations to distant sufferers. If we don\u2019t, then this language will be developed for us, in code, and in secret, in ways more dystopian than even Postman could envision.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The author would like to thank the students in his WRI 128\/129 “Witnessing Disaster” seminar, who read and commented on an early draft of this essay<\/p>\n

Timothy Recuber is a sociologist who studies how American media and culture respond to crisis and distress. His work has been published in journals such as New Media and Society, The American Behavioral Scientist, Space and Culture, Contexts, and Research Ethics.<\/p>\n

@timr100<\/a>
\ntimrecuber.com<\/a><\/p>\n

Headline Pic via: Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Atrocities in Eritrea atop my Twitter feed. A few tweets below that, police violence against an innocent African American girl at a pool party. Below that, the story of a teen unfairly held at Rikers Island for three years, who eventually killed himself. Below that, news about the seemingly unending bombing campaign in Yemen. Below […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1753,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9967,892,10006],"tags":[46,13319,36427,36374,36375,118,142,10242],"class_list":["post-20110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","category-essay","category-guest-author","tag-activism","tag-big-data","tag-guest-author","tag-infoglut","tag-infoguilt","tag-journalism","tag-news","tag-slacktivism"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1753"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20110"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20110\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20116,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20110\/revisions\/20116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}