I'll take the opportunity to drop one of my favorite quotes from Herb Simon (Turing award and Nobel prize winner, artificial intelligence pioneer, father of behavioral economics, founder of CMU's Computer Science department):
"""
In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. (Simon 1971.)
"""
> a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes.
one could also say that when there's a scarcity of newsworthy events, or things to cover that might sell advertising to certain demographics, you get entirely new media things (like TMZ) which are the trashy digital version of the UK tabloid
press.
if such media organizations within that category think there is a scarcity of attention, they'll fabricate something new and shocking and hype it endlessly until it becomes a top item.
media entities creating entire media properties/brands for the purpose of reporting about the goings-on of other media entities/celebrities/brands.
it's like an ouroboros of media made from kardashians, hype, fear, angst, anger (hello rupert murdoch).
now combine the above with what I would charitably describe as weaponized advertising technology, building profiles on individual facebook/twitter/instagram/tiktok/whatever social media users and their extended friends network.
I wouldn’t say there is a scarcity of newsworthy events. You could spend all your waking hours just reading about important things happening in the world and still not run out.
However, reading newsworthy events takes a lot of brain energy, and you can’t sustain that all day. That means if you want people to spend a lot of time consuming your content, it has to be easy to consume content.
I totally agree there really isn't a scarcity of newsworthy events worldwide for the persons who care to read sober, rational news media reporting on various things (economy, politics, wars, transportation, international aid/development, etc). I'm talking about things written by people who have actual degrees in journalism, politics, economics from well respected universities whose names are recognized internationally. Journalism that wins Pulitzer prizes.
Then we have a whole other category of "news" which has been fabricated out of whole cloth for the purpose of selling even more advertising to a vast demographic of people who are never, or very rarely going to sit down to read the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Globe and Mail, Los Angeles Times or similar on a daily basis.
I have a theory that the aggregate advertising revenue from the latter class of "news" is rapidly eclipsing the first type.
For several weeks it was almost impossible to escape the endless firehose of "news" from the Depp / Heard trial. I think it is a very clear example of this.
You think the trial was cooked up by the media so they could report on it? Like, the media convinced Heard to have that article written up in the first place?
I mean, assuming the whole thing wasn't made up (and I doubt it was), I think it's an instance where the news was more than just random celebrity gossip. That case touched on some important issues about domestic violence (especially against men) and freedom of speech which I think would have made it newsworthy enough on its own. From Depp's perspective at least, it was also important to have the case play out very publicly since he was trying to use it as an opportunity to clear his name.
That said, the media sure did exploit it for all it was worth. I'm still seeing articles about it and expect there will be plenty more.
No I'm not claiming anything is made up. And it certainly is newsworthy in that it should've spawned a couple articles here and there, and maybe a couple covering its conclusion. What we got instead was completely out of proportion for any journalistic measure of 'newsworthiness'.
What's the connection between TMZ and UK tabloids? It's based and founded in the US where we have our own supermarket checkout trash, plus ample TV trash that likely provided much of the inspiration for it.
Neil Postman's book "Amusing Ourselves to Death" discusses this tension in detail. It was written in 1985 as an analysis of the effect of television on our attention span but his conclusions are even more applicable to digital media.
That was a depressing read, knowing where things went afterwards.
//EDIT: Decent Roger Waters album, though. I should hunt it down on vinyl.
"The Shallows" by Carr - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shallows_(book) - was even worse. Published in 2010, based on research dating up to about 2008, it said, "Huh. Reading stuff on a screen is weird. We need to be really, really careful about what we do with that going forward."
And it was entirely ignored as we launched into the smartphone, attention-vampire model of personal electronics.
Do you happen to know if there’s been any research into whether e-ink (thinking of my Kindle here) is any better than reading off of a traditional screen?
I'm not sure. I've moved most of my reading and reference material to e-ink (Kobo, I avoid Amazon in every way possible and de-DRM anything I can only find on them), and I think it's better than a LCD from a distraction perspective, but it lacks some of the "concrete physical location cues" of a real book.
The Shallows talked about how hyperlinks and such were a major distraction point in reading web articles, so I'd imagine e-ink is better for book form, but... no, I don't know for sure. Sorry.
I will say that people look at me funny when I tell them, after sending me an hour YouTube video on some topic, that I'd rather they send me the titles of three comprehensive books on it. If it's interesting to me, I'll read the books, and have a far better grasp on the topic than someone's biased, attention-focused video, though.
For me, it depends. There are good videos, and there are not so good books.
Problem is, you can't know which is which before having seen/read them.
Regarding Youtube, if you have an account there you can curate your experience. Any video you didn't like? Erase it from your history. Any channel whose producer kills your nerves with over-dramatizing, grimacing, adverts? Block it.
Any channel which produces vapid fluff which you find uninformative, boring, etc.? Block it. Any channel which trends on the homepage, which you see when you go there without cookies, and logged out? Block them.
That gives a vastly different experience, with much less trash. I guess I have a few hundred blocks now, and almost no subscriptions to any channels. Much better discoverability of new stuff that way, and no spam from subscribed channels either.
Btw., who is saying that books aren't biased? ;->
Furthermore different people have different 'neuroarchitectures', habits, training, resulting in different 'learning experiences' and preferences.
I think there are topics which profit from hyperlinking. Especially when complex and interlinked with other complex topics.
But... it needs to be produced with 'readability' in mind, otherwise it's a mess. Think of it as a Mind- or Concept-map, maybe with something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explorable_explanation embedded , for getting an overview into something new.
OTOH there are videos on YT where people just present something with a few slides, sometimes short animations which are excellent, no matter if hobbyist, some technical conference, or academic context.
No comparison to something from History Channel, Disney, National Geographic, or such. While National Geographic has excellent 'production values', WTF they need to spoil that with background music? (This is the one thing that is aggravating me so much in documentaries.)
Long story short: There are many things which can profit from animations, short video clips, or full documentary style. Also talented and competent speakers.
See it as a thing where countless words, and maybe formulas and illustrations have been compressed into a 'flip-book', thereby reaching an information density which enables you to get into it fast, or even to understand it at all because it is so vast, needing that density to even try to get all that stuff across.
Of course, if you're already deep into something, then most of what's available will only make you yawn. But still, I've been surprised by some things which I've thought I'd knew very well, but didn't :-)
IMO hypermedia is the way to tackle the ever growing complexity of interdisciplinary science in general, and also for the sciences themselves.
Linear books don't cut it anymore.
Problem is we lack good tools/software/systems for authoring and combining it.
> Btw., who is saying that books aren't biased? ;->
And that's why I specifically said three. If I read one, I won't have enough grasp of the subject to be able to identify any biases. If I read three, I probably will be able to sort out when one of the three is out in left field on something in particular.
As for your assertions about video, Amusing Ourselves to Death and The Shallows make well researched arguments that are exactly opposite what you're trying to argue here. You might read them.
The morality of the medium used to be something up for debate until the wild wild internet won everyone over. The old critiques of TV fit alarmingly well with our present media landscape, what's sadder is they are rarely brought up even in digital minimalist topics.
A few of the other sub-commentors here are talking about a good bookshelf as a solution to Herb's problem.
I think it's a great idea. But, as always, determining what is on that bookshelf is a tough one.
The Harvard Classics was a great attempt about a century ago [0]. 'Dr. Elliot's 5 foot shelf of books' was what an undergraduate degree at Harvard in 1909 included. Harvard University President Charles W. Eliot put together about all of the great books that those Gilded Age scions were supposed to digest.
Personally speaking, the greatest thing about the Harvard Classics was the 15-minute-a-day Reading Guide to the corpus. I went through it all a few years ago, and man, that was a really good idea. Like, I like Shakespeare now; he's really good! And I read through that philosophy finally, and that was really good too! And, lord, the poetry; I never really liked poems, but now I really love them. Most days were like that for me. I'll fully admit though, there were some real stinkers in there. But only once in a while.
Vol. 2, pp. 31-43 : Plato's Crito -- Socrates unceasingly strove for beauty, truth, and perfection. Sentenced to death on a false charge, he refused to escape from the death cell, even when opportunity was offered.
As an aside, I'd love for an updated version of the Harvard Classics complete with 15-minute-a-day type readings or other media. I really did look forward to that dose of mind-training every day when I went through it. Does anyone know of a good place for daily mind training that is like this?
I'll try my level best to post the daily reading every day for the next year. Let's use those posts as a place to discuss the readings. Join me on this 15-minute-a-day quest to bettering ourselves.
This is why, in practice, you'd still probably come out way better, intellectually and perhaps in terms of happiness, spending a few years with a well-curated bookcase—or even just a library card—and some notebooks, rather than unfettered access to the Web, despite what a lot of us thought about it'd bring to the world, years ago.
A good bookcase still wins. Turns out I don't have time for "everything" anyway (and it's not really got everything, anyway, though The Web is very good at delivering 'everything' when it comes to cheap trivia)
One of my startup ideas is to create this "bookcase" for the web. A curated list of really solid "books" and other information sources.
My kids are constantly bringing home all kinds of interesting things from the library, and I remember how much cool stuff there is on the shelves from my youth. That stuff is just missing from the web.
I'm surprised traditional publishers, the folks that actually print books, don't start working back through their catalogs building some kind of online library. I suspect that its because of the way contracts are written that don't leave anybody owning the complete book. I suspect you would have to go back to authors, photographers, and illustrators and renegotiate use of assets again.
The idea of a well curated bookcase beating access to the World Wide Web is not one I’m so sure about. Permissionless access to a massive consortium of information, even if most of it is low quality, has empowered communities to learn concepts that they normally would not be able to (Khan Academy, Wikipedia, YouTube). Id agree that sitting with a bookcase for a long time would lend itself well to analysis because there is such limited information, whereas the way most people use the internet is by consuming in abundance. But the ease of use and accessibility of the web beats books.
I think what they are getting at is if you want to actually learn some deep fundamental knowledge on a topic, its still going to be best found in a book today over a youtube video or a medium post. I agree with this. There is a lot of noise on the internet, and all of it is optimized for short form consumption that leaves out a lot of detail. Relevant blog posts you struggle to find due to SEO spam can't compare to a couple hundred page encyclopediac handbook on a given topic. If you want to change your oil maybe you can get by with a youtube video, but if you want to one day cultivate actual expertise you better buy that haynes manual that covers every little system in your car in one place you can easily reference that isn't prone to link rot. You are right that its hard to get good books for certain communities, but the internet comes in handy here, and plenty of good books are available freely online through means of varying legitimacy. If you want to really get a handle on physics, maybe finding a PDF of a good textbook in addition to those youtube videos would go further.
Those are examples of relatively well curated internet resources compared to a typical blog post or medium article. Khan Academy has allowed students the opportunity that underfunded schools miss—-for instance, the ability to advance their math skills, without the need of an expensive tutor.
I think part of the difference is if you're on a quest for particular knowledge (how to repair your car, how to rebuild a M35A2 winch) vs just browsing aimlessly.
In the first, the internet wins hands down most of the time (there are specialized areas where nothing has been digitized); but the second it's not clear that browsing the library is worse than doomscrolling, even if you're doomstrolling HN or something relatively "high quality".
To add on to the second point, when browsing the internet, you can skim dozens of articles on a certain subject like EU politics need without getting a clear picture of it, whereas all it takes is one we’ll crafted analytical book to get that overview.
If he actually said this in 1971, hats off to him. That's an amazing prediction. Internet and the personal computer (information-rich) became popular after 1970s, so predicting attention scarcity before that is very prescient.
The cynic in me says that hundreds of people guessed about computer's future in 1970s that some of them are bound to be right. But Simon's prediction seems genuinely amazing.
I want to mention that not 100% of our time needs to be spent on something "useful". While it's something everyone needs to define for themselves, recovery and enjoying life outside of what is deemed "productive" is also very much important. I am writing this because I have personally been affected (as bystander) if people don't take this seriously.
For Germany, I can say that in recent years, health insurances are reporting a very significant increase in burn-out cases which easily take months of recovery and are a very significant problem in the economy with high financial impact on both society and individual lives.
Maybe it has to do with the type of work we do nowadays, or it has simply become more acceptable to openly tackle this issue instead of hiding or dismissing it. I don't know. But I have personally witnessed several people (!) go through this and it's terrible. Hiding it doesn't mean it isn't there and ruining lives behind the scenes.
The 1800s was a different situation altogether and time-wise probably one of the worst periods to be alive as working class. 10-16 hour workdays, repetitive and physically demanding work, no rights and barely any medical attention. I am very certain that people didn't just "toughen" that out, it had to come at a very high cost.
Herbert Simon was of unbelievable intelligence. Everything I have read from him has been directly on point but yet literally decades ahead of its time.
I'd corrupt the quote slightly to factor informational effects of propaganda:
"a wealth of [conflicting] information creates [an apathy] of attention and a need to [withdraw] that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it."
In this way, information sources can destroy attention rather than foster efficient allocation (which is hard work).
Well if attention is all you need, we have bert now. so we will be able to sort through more information now. But the arms race between spam and attention is definitely going to language wars 2.
""" In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. (Simon 1971.) """