Living in the Era of Information Deluge
Navigating through an ocean of information, waiting for tsunami.
Through the last quarter of 20th century the world witnessed a technological revolution like never before. In the span of two to three decades, private individuals came in possession of technologies which in near past were inconceivable. One fundamental change these technologies were bringing was in the way we accessed information. While a precise beginning might be contested, but surely by the turn of the 21st century we were in the ‘Information Age’.
Two decades later, technologies which enabled information age - devices and internet - have grown multifold in coverage and have improved exponentially in usability. It was never easier to get the information that we wanted. It was also never easier to being bombarded by information which we never wanted.
In 2021, the world created about 75 zettabyte of data. One zettabyte is a trillion gigabyte or this much: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. In 2025, we will create double of it.
We are living in the era of information deluge.
The Context
Information deluge is a multidimensional topic which can be looked from various perspective including data accessibility, data analysis and visualization, storage cost and capacity, climate impact of generating and saving data, data usability, data democratization, data arbitrage, social erosion, political impact etc. And, make no mistakes, we are drowning on most of those fronts.
This post though limits its scope to the basics of human impact of information - how our access has grown, how is it impacting and how do we live in this deluge.
Power comes from knowing, but knowledge has also been called a curse. How much information is too much information? And, what do we do when we have too much information which gives too little knowledge?
From Oasis to the Ocean
Humans have traveled a long distance on the information journey. For the most part of known history, our exchange of information was highly localised and controlled. We mostly knew about things which we were closely associated with and directly affected our lives. Most people lived and died with information just about enough to go through their lives. That changed as the medium for information dissemination changed from oral to publishing to broadcasting to digital distribution.
While we traveled away from ‘information oasis’ and closer to ‘information river’ a few centuries ago; till quite recently we stayed along the rivers. And, the river always flow in one direction. Distribution channels with improving technology made information reach to many, but the information creation was still limited to a few. The advent of social media changed that.
Social Media removed the limits from information exchange. While earlier direction primarily remained broadcaster to reader, now it had become a peer to peer network. That was our first glimpse of the ocean. We enjoyed our day in the sun, on the beach. Looked at the vastness of the ocean, took a few dips and soaked in all the information we could. It was fun. It was enlightening. But with every dip the ocean was rising, we were going a little deeper; and before we knew we were one with the ocean.
Today, we are information. We are drowning in the information. And, that is also an information.
The Information Paradox (Not the Black Hole one - I am not Stephen Hawking, this is not 1970s)
In 2021, people across the globe made about 38 million Google searches, sent about 42 million WhatsApp messages, sent 150,000 messages on Facebook, watched 404,000 hours of streaming on Netflix and posted 347,000 stories on Instagram - all in a minute.
We are drowning in information deluge, yet thirsting for knowledge. There is an exponential increase in shared information, yet a counter-intuitive decrease in absorbed knowledge, and that is the one of the most important paradoxes of our times. The fact of the quantity is that it is most often, if not always, is marred with lack of quality.
Those who consume most amount of food, aren’t the healthiest. Those who consume most amount of information, aren’t the most knowledgeable.
The unchecked nature of the information exchange has muddied the water of our proverbial ocean to an extent that a significant amount of prior knowledge is required to gain any amount of additional knowledge from the information that we access through these exchanges. Most of us aren’t equipped with that kind of prior knowledge for the diverse information we encounter when we swim in the muddied water of this ocean.
Why more information is making a negative contribution to our knowledge?
There are fundamentally three reasons why quantity of information is crowding out the quality of knowledge to be gained from it.
Cost of Information: Good information cost time and effort - both to create and consume. They are produced non - frequently by very few people and are available less freely to be shared. They are also not reductive and easy to consume. Thus they do not fit in to the environment of peer to peer information exchange. How many times have you come across in your social media network, people sharing peer reviewed journals, data analysis, reports etc.? How many social media platform makes it easy to share & read that kind of reportage? How many people are willing to read that long or pay to access them?
The catchy, reductive, short form and low quality non-contextual un-caveated information are cheap to produce, easy to share and quick to consume. Think of memes, infographics, reels, images, screenshots and forwards that you come across every day.
Same can be extended to tabloid survey vs research studies, p-hacked research vs rigorous trials. On the same day you would come across research information telling you coffee can cause cancer and cure cancer. You will consume both information and come out no more wiser than before. May be a bit more confused than before.
Information Obsolescence: Information has power. Specially, over information. In the light of new information, we assume earlier contradictory information to be obsolete and unusable. This helps progress scientific thinking and is useful. But, it can have exactly opposite impact if the information that we rely upon is less truthful than the one we already had.
When in our muddied ocean, we are introduced to a new information and accept it, our earlier held notions become obsolete. It is more likely to happen on subject where our prior knowledge is not strong. Which means we are more likely to accept a misinformation on subjects we are not properly equipped to examine. Now, with our inability to properly inspect the subject, we either continue to switching every time we are exposed to new information on it and thus remain in a doldrum with no additional knowledge gained. Or, we fall on a wrong track, shut down course correction and have negative knowledge growth.
With the pace and scale of information exchange we have today, the rate of information falling off and becoming obsolete is too high. We not only as an individual junk the information we find unaligned, but also as a society junking a lot of information without examining its other facets. That is bigger loss of knowledge, but may be a little out of scope for this post.
Competitive Information: Information by its nature is competitive. It doesn’t arrive as a neutral entity; it comes as an agent of change driving our decisions. Since it does that, then it make sense for those who want to drive certain kind of change, circulate information which helps them. Propaganda is the extreme form of competitive information.
In our information ocean we get bombarded by competitive information. They aren’t often completely honest or a positive contribution to our knowledge. But the damage goes beyond the immediate impact of that piece of information. In this both, technology and our nature, are our enemy.
The way most of the platforms designed, they play to our confirmation bias. Once we seek an information, the algorithms work overtime to reinforce them by surfacing more evidence in the support of the information we have already gobbled. Given that there are more lost cost low value information on the internet, they also get more supporting low cost low value information. Once we have endorsed any of them, we start falling in the trap of propagating them; in the beginning, to save our fragile ego and then eventually, displaying Stockholm syndrome in the captivity of the competitive information holding us on the ransom of face saving. We justify the truthfulness of that information to ourselves even when we should have known better.
Whatever be the reason which leads us to doubling down on competitive information we consumed and propagated, we do eventually make them a part of our knowledge base doing a negative contribution to it.
For every information that we consume, both, the reward and the cost, is our knowledge.
The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
Don’t get me wrong, the access to information is a good thing. It is the deluge of the low cost low value information which has made it so perilous.
It is the easy access to information which has led to technology revolution we are living in. Today a lot of information required to build new product, new software, new hardware, do research is available as open source. They have been translated in local languages, and have resulted in successful launches coming from the parts of world where people would not have had access to this kind of knowledge otherwise. The rising number of startups from smaller centers are a testimony to that.
It is also easy to access to information which is making societies more participative. Today people are way more informed about their leaders and government than they had ever been before. They are able to ask more question and get more policies designed for them. Communities are learning more about their torrid past and asking for retributions & reparations. History is being rediscovered, cultures are being promoted and nature is being preserved.
There is plenty good that has come out of peer to peer networks that has been built. A lot of learning resources are now available for free or at extremely low cost. We can learn about people and places across the world without leaving home. Pursue any kind of interest and witness world events unfolding in front of our eyes. Know traffic on the road, get reviews to make buying decisions, network with relevant people.
But, there is also bad. We discussed in slight detail the information paradox. But lets pick more practical bad that information deluge is doing. Pseudo-research fills the internet, the value of expertise is getting lost, distraction opportunities are aplenty, attention span is getting limited, negative engagement is on the rise and expectations are delusional.
Just because one can google, one doesn’t become an expert. Access to information has given people a false sense of understanding. It is important to understand that a snapshot is not the map. There is more to subject than the information one accesses. People are self diagnosing, picking cheaper way out to earn a certificate than going through quality learning, arguing opinions and giving out expert advises on healthcare, nutrition, finance, career, mental health etc. after reading a blog or watching a video.
Exposure to a lot of information is giving us a false sense of learning and in turn dumbing us down. Ease is taking over rigour. We would rather learn politics from 30 second TikTok video from a fashion blogger than a 2 hour detailed session from a 30 year expert in the field.
Though that is still now the ugly. Information can instigate. At the scale and pace it is available to use, it can instigate a lot of people in a very short span of time. We have seen riots across the world abated on social media by information shared through peer networks. We saw disinformation resulting in people self medicating to harm during pandemic. The same pace and scale has helped us bringing support to a good cause as well, but the lives lost to the ugly information cannot be brought back. The live tweeting of terror attacks, riots, protests, police actions, wars have been mishandled and misused a lot of times. The deluge of hate has been generated on internet and then have been used to target people in real world. This is where we really drown, not metaphorically.
BYOB -Bring your own Boat
In this deluge, nobody is coming to rescue you. Bring your own boat.
The nature of medium is that it will only swell. The tsunami in our proverbial ocean is yet to come and it will keep coming. By 2025, we will be producing about 150 zettabyte of date on the internet. That is a lot of information. A lot of it will affect you, a lot of it will be about you and much will be how it affected you. Your every action on internet is getting recorded.
God is not your witness, internet is. Be careful of what you do. You will be judged accordingly by the algorithms.
Get off the ocean, get in the boat and watch the wave while your are riding it. Create you safety net and use information on internet to help you. Don’t let it drown you.
A simple method that I follow is comprised for three Ds - Declutter, Delineate and Disassociate.
Declutter
Make it difficult for the unwanted information to reach you. Wherever possible use advertisement blockers to shield yourself from promoted content, and if not possible then train yourself mentally to ignore promoted and sponsored information. These are most competitive of competitive information.
Identify and block sources which are known to share pseudo research, misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories etc. Also, block the subject which you do not have real interest or real benefit from, but often work as a distraction for you.
Use positive filters i.e. instead of just blocking bad sources, try and follow only those sources which share useful and verifiable information. You would realize much of your time and attention are grabbed by information which you had no interest in the first place. Think scrolling.
On your mobile devices reduce the number of apps which gives out general information to you. Turn off push notifications.
Delineate
Organize your information in distinct category based on purpose that it is serving you. Your learnings should not come from a channel which for entertainment. Pet peeves shouldn’t end up building inherent belief.
Of course, all the mediums and channels can and should be a trigger for curiosity but you should be extremely clear where you need to go and amount you need to read up before forming an opinion.
Also create spatial and temporal delineation. Information on which subject, from what geography is relevant for you at what time?
Delineate your interest level and learning objective as well. While you might want to keep up with the current political environment of United Stated of America, are you so deeply interested that you want to understand the implication of Reagan era policies on it?
And strongly barricade your expertise from your general understanding. Recognize what are the skills that you really have, and what you might be aware of thanks to your online habits.
Disassociate
Logout, really!
Not every information that you come across needs to stay in your system. Something might pique your interest while you are browsing, you might get pulled in to an opinionated discussion on a Facebook group, you might find a Twitter thread interesting, but if they do not serve a purpose for you they do not need to remain in your active system. Leave them where you picked them up. They might be good while you read them, but that is how long you were meant to be with them.
Most of the information aren’t worth your mental space.
Of course, none of these methods are without caveats. Check your biases when you decide on your channels for information. Corroborate and cross check information before internalizing them. Routinely check your channels for their biases.
Yeah, it is obviously not easy to navigate in open ocean. But then, it is a pirate life for us!
This turned out longer than I had expected. Hope you liked it. There is so much more to write about Information Deluge we are facing and much deep dive that can be done on human impact of it. At some point I will write something solely focused on how it has changed the learning and academic environment, specially for school students.
Let me know your take on the topic and if there is any aspect that you would like to read on.