I've been thinking about the internet.
I'm going to try and describe some phenomenon that I think a lot of people experience related to the internet, why I think they're not great, why these personal things matter to us all and then list out a couple strategies that have helped me deal with them.
In general, I've found that discussions of these topics are a bit dimissive and downplay just how strong of an impact our usage of the internet has on us. I'll try to avoid being a doomsayer and rather just try to explain.
I used to think about the internet as a place that I went to. I knew when I was there because I had to do something to get there: plug in a CD or use up the phone line. Now, the internet is everywhere. It's expected* and we're constantly finding new ways to embed it in our lives. It's hard to even tell sometimes when something is connected or not. I didn't even realize that smart TVs were serving me ads until last year. This pervaviseness lends the internet a unique point of leverage to affect us.
- *no WIFI at the coffee shop? Ugh. Maybe you just stepped into the wrong neighborhood?
Advertising was around pretty early on the internet, but it had much more obvious form. I'm pretty sure I learned ALT+F4 just to close pop-up spam. Today, the digital advertising ecosystem is huge. A key transition point was the development of targeting technology. Two of the largest companies in the world, Google and Facebook, prospered almost solely from this.
Most content sites now use digital advertising as a primary source of revenue and in this model, businesses are the customers and we are the product. In the "attention economy" the content becomes more of a lure than anything. The digital advertising ecosystem doesn't need to make our lives better or help us, it just needs to send us the right ads at the right time.
The internet is deeply embedded into our lives and its strongest incentives promote monetizing peoples' attention and profiling data, not enriching their lives. These two forces lead to systems of content distribution that are disruptive to the very basic ways that we instinctively process information.
We are bombarded with content from a million different angles: emails, text messages, "infinite scrolling" features and notifications.
Enabled by the internet and in service of the attention economy, there is tons of noise and a lot less signal going around. What exactly is happening when we get caught in this infinite content loop?
Some useful terminology here:
- thought work - trying to achieve depth of focus in order to understand something better. Critically evaluating information and your own thoughts. A phrase I like is, "asking the 'next' question".
- mental context - when doing a particular task, it's all the "moving parts" that you have to keep track of to be able think about that task. It can be tough to build it up and often gets lost quickly.
- context switching - the act of cycling through various mental contexts, either on purpose or because of a disruption. Picture writing an email and then getting an urgent notification which you read, respond to and then go back to writing that original email. Generally, it takes some time to "get back into it". What was that thing you were about to write?
The infinite content loop affects the interplay of the above three things:
- to get good thought work done you need to build out a rich mental context with all sorts of relevant information, which requires a fair bit of time and focus. Consuming content in such haphazard ways causes so much context switching that the process of thinking deeply becomes disjointed or completely derailed. A general term for this is information overload.
Information overload is difficult enough to deal with on its own. We have a limited amount of mental energy per day and physical systems, like dopamine release, are seriously affected by our content consumption habits. All of these effects get amplified when you consider the actual types of content that we're consuming.
Instead of focusing on creating their own content to fuel the attention economy, many companies instead created systems to support user-generated content. Let us create and then just watch to figure out what's best at getting/keeping our attention.
How does a site tell what content we like best? To start, we tell them! In some cases, it's explicit (e.g. like, subscribe, share, comment etc.) and in others it's derived from a variety of tracked behaviours. When you're quickly scrolling and then stop to watch a video on TikTok, it's a strong signal that you like that kind of content. Lots of subtle actions can be recorded on the web (e.g. how long you watch a video, where your mouse is on a screen etc.).
All of this is data fed into software that is really good at what it does. Enter "content suggestion algorithms":
- content suggestion algorithms - programs that use a wide variety of data to predict the subject matter or style of content that people are most likely to engage with (e.g. the "because you liked XYZ" on Netflix, Facebook feed)
This isn't bad by itself! Content suggestion can be SO COOL when it's combined with useful inputs like your taste in music or movies. It can filter out garbage and give us access to awesome jokes and amazing videos. The problem arises when we start to look at the things that tend to be the most "consumable".
We have instincts that can be pretty reliably exploited. They're very reflexive and so they're hard to even notice at times. I broadly think of them as "emotional triggers" or appealing to "bias", but whatever the underlying processes, the ultimate outcome is that we tend to engage with content that has some consistent attributes:
- short
- emotionally "resonant" (e.g. lmao what a karen, ifykyk)
- inflammatory
- extreme in some way (e.g. violence, distress)
Remember, the incentive is attention, not benefit, and so, we have terms like "click bait" and then more recently "outrage bait" that take oh-so-lovely forms:
- Top 10 Things You Should NEVER Do At a Party! (If You Want To Get Your Dick Sucked)
- Alpha Tells the TRUTH That No Woman Wants to Hear! - DESTROYS Feminist
ASIDE: while consuming content we tend to do the easiest thing first (e.g. like, share, comment) and the hardest last, if at all (e.g. actually watch, read or think about)
Content suggestion is ABSOLUTELY HORRID when combined with emotional triggers. One second you're casually scrolling TikTok and the next you're falling down a rabbit hole of "edgy red pill alpha anti-PC hustler" content. Instead of going to a tea party, though, you're signing up for Hustler's University and posting affiliate links on your new RateTate69 TikTok account. This isn't good for us. We're not even interested half the time!
- NOTE: consider also how bad actors can leverage this
Another factor that amplifies context switching is that many content suggestion algorithms are delivered in "feeds" that combine all subjects in one place. In the same of 5 seconds you've looked at a dank edgy joke, an anti-abortion hot take and an update about a war. This is genuinely confusing.
Information overload makes it baseline difficult for us to find time to think and content suggestion makes it so that when we do find time to think our minds are generally filled with garbage.
This is where we're at:
- deeply embedded and accessible digital world that is difficult to avoid
- an ecosystem designed around monetizing attention
- powerful techniques to gain/keep our attention, which generally offer low-quality or unhelpful content
- so much noise that it's difficult to process information, leaving us exhausted, depressed and reactionary all while being inundated with the low-quality content
And this is how I visualize it, after my mind is numb from content scrolling and I am subconsciously updating my knowledge of the current "meme meta":
A couple small real-life examples:
- finishing one question on an assignment, then alt-tabbing to look at a meme (some unrelated joke about a current political issue), finishing another question, then picking up your phone to check a message (a request to hang out later in the week) and finally back to the assignment
- reading a group chat while browsing tiktok/reddit/youtube/instagram/twitter feeds, periodically checking your email then opening uber eats to see the promo they sent you. All of this while watching a tv show on Netflix in the background, which you will later refer to as "okaaay, but just not that engaging, yknow?"
We're just not going "deep enough" into most things. At a personal level, here are some more specific outcomes:
- imagine a drake meme where the left column is the "nuh uh" and the right column is the "uh huh"
| Healthier, but slow & hard (Nuh Uh) | Less healthy, but fast & easy (Uh Huh) |
|---|---|
| consistent thought work | hot takes & "gotchas" |
| being humble in the face of difficult subjects and ideas | feeling smart while never growing |
| thinking through middle-grounds, dealing with a "grey" reality and implementation issues | dying on hills, binary possibilities, simple theoretical answers |
| getting results | optics and feeling satisfied |
| working with others | pwning each other |
Call it internet addiction, or just a slightly bad habit that's kiiiiiinda playful and not really doing any harm. Whatever it is, it's something individual. I'm allowed to eat poorly, smoke, be sedentary and hardly sleep. It's my right. So, why should this matter anymore than those?
Unlike other personal behaviours, internet usage is so closely entwined with our minds and at such a greater magnitude that it can easily bleed over into many more things. Sure, I can smoke and get cancer (not shisha tho, that's filtered thru water bro) and be a burden on the healthcare system, but that's where it stops. I don't think there's a limit to the effects that our current relationship with the internet can have on us.
Dealing with the internet poses challenges for any individual, but once we add social elements into the mix it starts to get a lot more complicated.
These two quotes resonate with me on this:
when you read, another person is thinking for you
your first thought is rarely interesting
When they're combined, they highlight the issues we've seen with our collective distribution and processing of information. We don't often even get to our first thought on things, let alone dig deeper. So, we're left with the thoughts of whoever is producing the content we consume. Again, this is a normal part of filtering noise, but it starts to break down when:
- we don't acknowledge our incomplete understandings
- we promote the incomplete understanding
We over-react, over-share and under-think. We read fake outrageous comments and get pushed further into echo chambers. We get pulled into online interactions that are so detached from reality as to be meaningless, except they eventually do trickle over into real life if everyone believes in this imaginary battle they've been following online.
Our collective imagination gets so distorted that it's hard to keep track of the important aspects of any issue. These two ideas combine together to illustrate the difficulty:
Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it
You can't use reason to get yourself out of a position you didn't use reason to get into
It takes a genuinely large amount of work to disprove things while those things are extremely easy to just lie about. Further, if those things strike some emotional chords with people, especially when they don't realize it, then you probably will never be able to talk them out of it. We let passive beliefs/emotions* slowly grow stronger until they turn active* and we don't even see it happening.
- * things we don't put too much stake in, but kiiiinda think
- * things that dictate how/why we act certain ways
Right around March 2020 I started to see this impact my own life in a prominent way. I can't count the number of times someone sent me a random link and just said "???", or sent the "hmmm?" emoji, in regards to some aspect of COVID.
It wasn't a slow building of a coherent, consistent worldview based off of things that we value; it was just one-off impulses and emotions running rampant.
This has always happened to some degree and is probably a necessary part of any society, but I do think that the internet has taken it to a scale never before seen. We have a very potent pipeline that converts individual impulses into broad social impacts.
To avoid being fatalistic, here are some ways to alleviate the above:
- try to improve the ratio of content inputs:time spent processing
- even quick summaries of content can be useful!
- curate the content that you do consume
- time-boxed consumption
- subscribe to specific feeds instead of "all in one"
- use ad blockers
- acknowledge passive vs active beliefs
- if you reacted to some content, it had effect on you. Why? What're those underlying feelings?
- spend time thinking about things proportionally to the way that those things impact your life
They can all probably be summarized by sit quietly with your thoughts once in awhile.
The internet is pervasive in our lives. It is largely fueled by the attention economy, which uses well-designed tools to keep us engaged. The content we consume through these mechanisms and the way that we consume it has strong effects on very fundamental parts of ours minds.
We get stressed and depressed. We get overwhelmed with information and our basic ability to think gets disrupted. These individual effects get compounded and form strong feedback loops in any online community. Distorted realities, echo chambers and misinformation machines all build up as a consequence of these initially personal phenomenon.
We have built great things with the internet, but some of the systems have side-effects that are not in our best interests. Humanity generally has been accelerating in a lot ways and these effects have the potential to cause us to regress.
The systems are actively impacting you, so if you are not actively working against them, you'll probably see some of the negative effects. Some of the things you can do, as mentioned above, might be simple, but are difficult given the accessibility of the internet.
~Tyty