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Societal Implications of Information Overwhelm

Toxic uncertainty is like a tax on our brain

The new frontline for war

Misinformation, Filter Bubbles, And Fake News

  • Pandemic
  • War
  • Polarizaiton
  • Filterbubbles
  • Takes more time to decipher what's true

Challenge to social cohesion and democracy

Arguably the main difference between the influence of overload in the 21st century and in previous times is the way in which overload is now perceived to cause problems for social cohesion and political action, including loss of social social cohesion, political polarization, and a loss of vitality of the public sphere (Hargittai, Neuman and Curry 2012). There is a particular issue with people finding reliable information from news sources, when there are so many more online and social media sources, many of dubious validity, competing for the limited time and attention of their users (Kovach and Rosenstiel 2011, Anderson and Raine (2017), Schmitt, Debbeit, and Schneider 2018). Popkin (1993) found that voters in US elections used a variety of shortcuts in obtaining and evaluating news and information about parties, candidates and issues, even in pre-internet days. The same applies even more strongly in the age of the internet and social media, with simple and unreliable rules for selection being applied, and with information being avoided through filter bubbles, in which people seek only the political information and news which confirms their existing views (Cooke 2017, Case and Given 2016 pp.115-116). Overload also leads to unhelpful communication behaviour, such as sharing information, and links to information, without reading it carefully, if at all: TLDR (too long, didn't read) has become a popular acronym. —Study: Information Overload - An Overview

Trust is becoming more important

  • There's not enough time to keep up with everything. That's for sure. So, we need to place our trust in filters:
    • Curators
    • Algorithms

Info overwhelm as a tool for hidden influence

So this is another type of censorship that I have thought about but don't speak so much about. Which is censorship through complexity. And that is basically the offshore financial sector. Censorship through complexity. Censorship of what? Censorship of political outrage. With enough political outrage there is law reform and enough law reform you can't do it anymore. So why is it that all these careful tax structuring arrangements are so complex? I mean, they may be perfectly legal, but why are they so god damn complex? Well, because the ones that weren't complex were understood and the ones that were understood were regulated, so you're only left with the things that are incredibly complex. But how in the future will people deal with the fact that the incentive to publish information that is misleading, wrong, manipulative, is very high. Furthermore you can't figure out who the bad publisher was as well as the good...because there's anonymity in the system. [...] So when things become open things tend to become more complex, because people start hiding what they are doing, their bad behaviour, through complexity. And so that will be bureaucratic double speak is an example. When things get bureaucratized and so on, and everything becomes mealy mouthed, and so that's a cost of openness. Is that kind of bureaucratization, and in the offshore sector you see incredible complexity in the layers of things happening to one another so they become impenetrable. And of course cryptography is an intellectual system that has specialized in making things as complex as possible. Those things are hard to attack. On the other hand complex systems are also hard to use. So bureaucracies and internal communications systems which have this, which are full of weasel words and arse covering, are inefficient internal communications systems. And similarly, those tremendously complex offshore structuring arrangements are actually inefficient. But maybe you're ahead when the tax regime is high, but if the tax regime is zero you're not going to be ahead at all. Sorry, if the tax regime is 3%, you're not going to be ahead at all, you're going to be choked by the complexity. Transcript of Julian Assange and Eric Schmidt (former Google CEO)

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