We are a nation awash in data smog. This is more than just information overload — it’s not just that there’s too much information out there for one person to adequately encompass, it’s that there’s too much data out there to even make out the information clearly, let alone to evaluate and act on that information.
What’s worse is that unlike normal smog, which is the unintentional byproduct of our need to burn things to provide energy, much of the data smog is intentional. We aren’t supposed to be able to see clearly! Between pernicious advertising, ideological pronouncements, and allegedly entertaining “infotainment products”, we’re being bombarded with data explicitly intended to dull out senses and distract us from clear thinking about important matters.
This is not a conspiracy theory — it’s straight out of Marketing 101! Rational, considering actors make lousy consumers; deliberation and cautious evaluation muck up the democratic process; critical analysis makes the powerful look foolish. Marketing wants none of that! No, far better to engage the impulses, to feed the primal emotions of fear and longing, to get in and out in the blink of an eye.
Here’s a couple of examples:
Dumb Parents (Don’t) Rule!
Watch a kids TV show recently? Watch a few? You might have noticed a trend — dumb parents. Uncool, hapless, clumsy, dorky, way-out-there dumb parents. Remember the parents of yore? The Bradies, the Cleavers, even the Wah-Wah-Wahing parents of the Charlie Brown universe? They were pretty with it — voices of sanity and authority in an adult world kids struggled to grasp. Not any more — today’s TV parents are hopeless.
Why? Because that’s what media producers’ customers want. Not the kids — viewers aren’t customers, they’re product. You don’t buy Jimmy Neutron. The advertisers whose spots fill the commercial breaks during Jimmy Neutron buy you — the cartoon is just a way to get enough of you watching to make it worth the advertisers’ buck. Well, not you — your kids. You’re just a wallet with legs — what they really want is to show your kids really cool stuff that they’ll get you to buy. And of course, you’re going to say “No”. That’s where the show’s content comes in — your kids have just spent 4 hours learning that parents are uncool idiots who say “No” to all the coolest stuff.
Pay no attention to the scientist behind the curtain…
Why would an oil company like Exxon-Mobil fund global warming research? Anyone with half a brain knows that they’re only going to publish research that’s favorable to them. Why would a tobacco company fund research on second-hand smoke? Again, it only takes a 40-watt brain to realize that their results are going to be biased in their favor. Yet both petroleum companies and tobacco companies spend millions on research that nobody can possibly take seriously.
They don’t do it for love of science, obviously. Nor do they do it to convince you, or me, or anyone that smoking’s good for you and burning coal saves penguin lives. They hire scientists and churn out biased research to muddy the waters, pure and simple. Knowing that oil companies pay scientists to put out bogus climate change research calls into question the objectivity of all scientists — who’s to say that the scientists saying that burning coal is bad for the environment aren’t just as biased as the petroleum-backed scientists saying it’s not? Certainly not you — you’re no scientist! It’s perfectly logical, then, to conclude that “nobody knows for sure” and that it’s all just a political dance.
Dealing with data smog
Amid all this fear, uncertainty, and doubt-mongering, one thing’s absolutely sure: it’s going to get worse. And I don’t mean “it’s going to get worse before it gets better”; it may never get better. As more and more ways for data to reach us become prevalent (there will be more and more apps for that!), there will be more and more ways to obscure what’s important amid what’s urgent, like buying things.
So we have to learn to deal with it, to sort through the come-ons and the panic-inducing attacks and find the information that actually makes our lives better. Here’s a crash course in smog survival:
- Get educated: The most important step in dealing with data smog is to build up your mental toolkit, and that means getting educated. There’s a reason that Jefferson saw education as the cornerstone of a functioning democracy.
- Share your ideas with others: Community can be a great protection from malevolent data. Tell people what you’re thinking to avoid the echo effect of standing alone in a tunnel, where only you hear your ideas coming back to you. Suddenly “I’m going to buy a sports car” doesn’t seem like such a great way of dealing with your pattern baldness, does it?
- Winnow news sources to one or two trusted daily sources (local and national paper, for example) and three or four less frequent analytical sources (magazines, mostly). In their quest to differentiate themselves, news outlets pour on all sorts of gloss and glitter (everything except actual analysis, it seems), but they’re really reporting the same stuff as everyone else — probably from the same wire. Get what you need and move on.
- Learn marketing techniques: Learn what makes your news sources and other information sources attractive to their customers (advertisers) and take that into account. Read up on how marketers do their job, so you can identify when marketing techniques are being used on you. Try Robert Cialdini’s classic Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion for a good primer.
- Follow the money: Find out who paid for research and what the payers’ goals are. Most academic books and articles list this in the acknowledgements (for books) or the footnotes (for articles); for mainstream books, you may have to check the references.
- Follow the interests: Ask who a story seems to help, and how.
- Consume critically: Ask yourself if the opposite conclusion is possible, and how your source deals with that possibility. Biased sources usually ignore or belittle opposing viewpoints, instead of engaging them. But it’s rarely likely that the other side is stupid or in some sort of conspiracy.
- Does it matter? Maybe this should be the first thing you ask, about anything. It’s easy to get caught up in things that ultimately don’t matter. That’s OK if you’re just having fun, but not much to build a life on.
This isn’t anything like a comprehensive response to data smog — at best it’s Data Smog 101. But it’s a start — and we need a start, because the alternative is getting less and less informed about the real world around us. Maybe you have some ideas? Let’s hear ‘em in the comments.
Great article Dustin, you make many good points here.
The problem with thinking critically when in the midst of all this data smog, is that the capacity to think critically is impaired when we’re trying to comprehend all the information that we’re exposed to.
I believe it was Spinoza that argued that in the effort to comprehend something, we need to believe in it first. Critical thinking comes later. In the effort to make sense of data smog, we often find ourselves playing into the hands of the marketers.
Hi Dustin.
Your message here is on point.
Marketing certainly doesn’t want rational folks who take their time and think first think about what is valuable to them.
The TV shows with dumb parents and product placements certainly do both sides of the job, and create nearly-addicted customers.
That point about the scientists is one I had not really thought about, but that sure does make sense. Creating confusion about the science by adding in conflicting or smoggy research would do a lot to remove any source of problems for a company’s bottom line.
Lot of examples here to keep people from getting into a routine of falling to marketing ploys.
I seem to recall the original purpose of fairy tales was to scare children into correct behavior and away from dangerous places like dark forests. Perhaps we should have modern day fairy tales about people getting hurt by marketing ploys. Nothing stronger than a good story, especially to children.
The lack of thought-provoking programming is the major reason I choose to read books, magazines and newspapers, both hard copy and online, instead of relying on television. Most television “news” is really entertainment with very little news: Today Show, Morning Show, and even the Evening News spends way too much time on what entertainers are doing rather than on in-depth coverage of news that affects all of us. Listen to NPR for indepth news coverage and check with Snopes.com for misinformation. There’s power in thinking beyond what you hear in the medai and reading from multiple news sources to find the biases and slants and counteract them in your own thinking.
Great article Dustin, you make many good points here.
The problem with thinking critically when in the midst of all this data smog, is that the capacity to think critically is impaired when we’re trying to comprehend all the information that we’re exposed to.
Great title! Information pollution! Data smog!
BTW, it seems some problems when I try to open the original artical from my google reader by clicking the RSS title. It open a address began with rss.lifehack.org and it never works.Please check that out!
Good luck!
[...] By Dustin Wax, Original Link [...]
Great article Dustin!
Great post and I like the analogy of data smog.
The truth is that in the past years, the “cloud” of informations has exploded! We know that we have access to it, but we don’t know how to use it. We get too much informations, and our filters are not very good!! We need to perfection our filters, in order to feel less dizzy, and not knowing what to read first, or what newsletter to open first, or which book to buy.
This is a very very good post! I enjoyed it a lot.
Thank you!
[...] How can information be considered Pollution? Very simple. We do not realize it, but we are Living with Data Smog. We are a nation awash in data smog. This is more than just information overload — it’s not just [...]
We are definitely living in a ‘data smog’ but it is not all a bad thing. Hopefully we can make some sense out of the data smog. They say the average IQ rises slightly every year – I think this overload of information is confusing but does increase our ability to process information.
This strategy has been around for ages. (If you can’t convince them, confuse them.) I think that between the burgeoning of mass communication and the fact that much of our economy is now apparently based on buying unneccesary stuff it’s not surprising that data smog has gotten so far out of control. Obviously it’s a problem, but I can’t see it coming up over the dinner table in the average American layperson’s household. The concept is just so abstract and data obfuscation so normal. Regulation isn’t likely considering, but what about a public awareness campaign, a movement aimed against mental pollution? Does anyone know if something like this exists?
[...] article from : Life Hack This entry was written by admin and posted on December 3, 2009 at 12:23 am and filed under laptop, [...]
[...] Wax has another great article over at Stepcase Lifehack: “Information Pollution Alert! Living with Data Smog”. This is about marketing, with specific examples, and what you can do to fight [...]
Does it matter? Great question when sifting through the onslaught of information overload. Online. In the mailbox. On broadcast news. I put myself on an internet and TV diet. I’m only allowed 50 minutes a day online, and that includes uploading to my blog. And 30 minutes TV.