Over on Stratecherry Ben Thompson discusses a number of technical aspects of SARS-CoV-2 and the disease it’s causing, COVID-19. Among other things, he gets into a bit of information composition theory, which is a some jargon I just made up:
The Internet, though, threatens second estate gatekeepers by giving anyone the power to publish:
Just as important, though, particularly in terms of the impact on society, is the drastic reduction in fixed costs. Not only can existing publishers reach anyone, anyone can become a publisher. Moreover, they don’t even need a publication: social media gives everyone the means to broadcast to the entire world. Read again Zuckerberg’s description of the Fifth Estate:
People having the power to express themselves at scale is a new kind of force in the world — a Fifth Estate alongside the other power structures of society. People no longer have to rely on traditional gatekeepers in politics or media to make their voices heard, and that has important consequences.
It is difficult to overstate how much of an understatement that is. I just recounted how the printing press effectively overthrew the First Estate, leading to the establishment of nation-states and the creation and empowerment of a new nobility. The implication of overthrowing the Second Estate, via the empowerment of commoners, is almost too radical to imagine. [From an earlier post by Thompson -HAW]
The current gatekeepers are sure it is a disaster, especially “misinformation.” Everything from Macedonian teenagers to Russian intelligence to determined partisans and politicians are held up as existential threats, and it’s not hard to see why: the current media model is predicated on being the primary source of information, and if there is false information, surely the public is in danger of being misinformed?
The Implication of More Information
The problem, of course, is that focusing on misinformation — which to be clear, absolutely exists — is to overlook the other part of the “everyone is a publisher” equation: there has been an explosion in the amount of information available, true or not. Suppose that all published information followed a normal distribution (I am using a normal distribution for illustrative purposes only, not claiming it is accurate; obviously in sheer volume, given the ease with which it is generated, there is more misinformation):
And then Thompson gets on to discussing how he thinks true and false information fill out the area under the bell curve – see right. What impressed me, however, was his omission of perhaps the most important part of any diagram of this sort – the absorption rate of consumers of this information.
Look, in computer science we often talk about data sources and data sinks. The former term should be self-explanatory, but it means the source of the data to be processed: files on disks, data coming from a network link, etc. A data sink, on the other hand, is the processor of that data: how it’s analyzed, transformed, and stored (each of those steps may be omitted, depending on requirements)[1].
Now, what happens if your data source is providing data faster than your data sink can process it? It’s a complex problem which, depending on the requirements again, can result in queueing data on disk to just throwing away data on a random basis.
In either of the above diagrams, it would be very helpful to have an estimate of the data processing capability of an individual. Long time readers of this blog know that I have a minor fascination with bell curves (and maybe that’s why I’m driven to comment on Thompson’s post), but in this case I don’t see data processing having a bell curve.
Rather, I think the naive supposition would be that it’s a straight horizontal line. Our capacity to process doesn’t increase just because there’s more information out there.
But, worse yet, it may actually decrease, depending on what you’re measuring. True, a simple definition won’t yield much change, but what if you change it to primary information absorbed? I suggest that distraction by the increasing volume of information, since we’re not single-minded computers[2], would actually decrease our ability to absorb information. Call the loss absorption of meta-data, if you like. I have experienced this myself as I’ve found long-form journalism sometimes difficult to process when I know I can get scatter-shot tidbits off of Facebook and the like.
But, worse yet, for the conscientious, the awareness of false information drives a requirement that we somehow verify the information that is candidates to be processed! That, in itself, takes time and energy from the actual processing – sometimes vast amounts. This changes the net amount of true information that we can absorb.
I think that would have made Thompson’s chart much more interesting.
1 I’m sure I’ve dropped out a few steps, as my training is from a long time ago and I’m absent-minded, so be nice if you’re going to bust my chops.
2 I suppose we could draw an analogy with thread-programming, but why bother? I’m not aware of every single issue with thread programming, as my exposure to it is only in the highly obscure language Mythryl.
