Infoglut

How Too Much Information Is Changing the Way We Think and Know

Mark Andrejevic

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135119515
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencia de la computación
• Subtopic: Aspectos sociales en las ciencias de la computación

Today, more mediated information is available to more people than at any other time in human history. New and revitalized sense-making strategies multiply in response to the challenges of "cutting through the clutter" of competing narratives and taming the avalanche of information. Data miners, "sentiment analysts, " and decision markets offer to help bodies of data "speak for themselves"—making sense of their own patterns so we don't have to. Neuromarketers and body language experts promise to peer behind people's words to see what their brains are really thinking and feeling. New forms of information processing promise to displace the need for expertise and even comprehension—at least for those with access to the data.

Infoglut explores the connections between these wide-ranging sense-making strategies for an era of information overload and "big data, " and the new forms of control they enable. Andrejevic critiques the popular embrace of deconstructive debunkery, calling into question the post-truth, post-narrative, and post-comprehension politics it underwrites, and tracing a way beyond them.

1
Introduction

Infoglut and Clutter-Cutting

Data Overload

After a two-year investigation into the post-9/11 intelligence industry, the Washington Post revealed that a sprawling array of public and private agencies was collecting more information than anyone could possibly comprehend. As the newspaper’s report put it, “Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications. The NSA sorts a fraction of those into 70 separate databases.”¹ The NSA is merely one amongst hundreds of agencies and contractors vacuuming up data to be sifted, sorted, and stored. The resulting flood of information is, in part, a function of the technological developments that have made it possible to automatically collect, store, and share fantastic amounts of data. However, making sense of this information trove at the all-too-human receiving end can pose a problem: “Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year – a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.”² The so-called “Super Users” who are supposed to have access to the whole range of information generated by the intelligence apparatus reportedly told the Post that “there is simply no way they can keep up with the nation’s most sensitive work.”³ As one of them put it, “I’m not going to live long enough to be briefed on everything.”⁴

The lament is a familiar one in an era of information overload – and not just for intelligence agencies, marketers, and other collectors of databases. The same challenge is faced by any citizen attempting to read all of the news stories (or Tweets, or status updates, or blogs posts) that are published on a given day, or a financial analyst researching all of the available information pertaining to the performance of a particular company. When I was a journalist in the early 1990s, just as computers entered the newsroom, we had available to us several electronic newswires that updated themselves automatically with stories on topics ranging from international news to US politics to sports and entertainment. I remember thinking at the time that it was impossible to keep up with the news as it unfolded on my screen. By the time I had read one wire story, dozens of new ones had been filed from around the world. That was just a tiny taste of the coming information cornucopia. Now an unimaginably unmanageable flow of mediated information is available to anyone with Internet access.

The paradox of an era of information glut emerges against the background of this new information landscape: at the very moment when we have the technology available to inform ourselves as never before, we are simultaneously and compellingly confronted with the impossibility of ever being fully informed. Even more disturbingly, we are confronted with this impossibility at the very moment when we are told that being informed is more important than ever before to our livelihood, our security, and our social lives.

This is not to suggest that it might, once upon a time, have been possible to be “fully informed”– n the sense of knowing all the details of the daily events, their various causes, explanations, and interpretations relating to our social, cultural, political, and economic lives. As Jorge Luis Borges’s (insomnia-inspired) allegory of the mnemonic phenomenon Funes suggests, every day we are bombarded with more information than we can possibly absorb or recall. The ability to capture and recount all of this information in detail is precisely what made Funes a freak – or a god: “We, at one glance, can perceive three glasses on a table; Funes, all the leaves and tendrils and fruit that make up a grape vine. He knew by heart the forms of the southern clouds at dawn on the 30th of April, 1882, and could compare them in his memory with the mottled streaks on a book in Spanish binding he had only seen once and with the outlines of the form raised by an oar in the Rio Negro the night before the Quebracho uprising.”⁵ There are, of course, some drawbacks to total information awareness, Funes-style: it took him a full day to remember a day (and presumably even longer to recall the day spent remembering it). Moreover, Funes was only recording his direct experiences – as yet un-augmented by the Internet and its bottomless reserves of mediated information.

If it has always been impossible to fully absorb the information by which we are surrounded – still more so to be “fully informed”– he palpable information overload associated with the digital, multi-channel era has made us aware as never before of this impossibility. In his book Data Smog, David Shenk observed that “It is estimated that one weekday edition of today’s New York Times contains more information than the average person in seventeenth-century England was likely to come across in a lifetime.”⁶ He does not say who did the estimating – and it is a formulation whose credibility, such as it is, depends on a particular definition of information: “in mass mediated form.” Surely during the 17th century people were absorbing all kinds of information directly from the world around them, as we do today through the course of our daily lives. There is little indication that our sensory apparatus has become more finely tuned or capacious. However, the amount of mediated information – that which we self-consciously reflect upon as information presented to us in constructed and contrived formats (TV shows, movies, newspapers, Tweets, status updates, blogs, text messages, and so on) via various devices including televisions, radios, computers, and so on – has surely increased dramatically, thanks in no small part to the proliferation of portable, networked, interactive devices. Even before the advent of these devices, all we had to do was go to the library to feel overwhelmed by more than we could possibly absorb. Now this excess confronts us at every turn: in the devices we use to work, to communicate with one another, to entertain ourselves. Gult is no longer a “pull” phenomenon but a “push” one. We don’t go to it, it comes to us. It is the mediated atmosphere in which we are immersed.

When all we had to do to keep up with the news, for example, was to read a daily newspaper and watch the network evening news, it was easier to imagine the possibility that someone like Walter Cronkite could tell us “the way it is” during the half-hour interlude of an evening newscast. By the first decade of the 21st century, the era of the most-trusted man in America was long gone, as evidenced, for example, by a poll revealing that despite (or perhaps because of) the proliferation of hours devoted to television news, not one major news outlet was trusted by the majority of the American people. Poll upon poll have revealed declining levels of public trust in news outlets and a heightened sense of perceived bias on the part of journalists. The researcher responsible for a 2008 poll noted that “an astonishing percentage of Americans see biases and partisanship in their mainstream news sources” presumably because, “The availability of alternative viewpoints and news sources through the Internet ... contributes to the increased skepticism about the objectivity of profit-driven news outlets owned by large conglomerates.”⁷ It is not just that there is more information available, but that this very surfeit has highlighted the incompleteness of any individual account. An era of information overload coincides, in other words, with the reflexive recognition of the constructed and partial nature of representation.

Cutting through the Clutter

If it is impossible to be fully informed, in the sense of knowing all of the available accounts of the world (and the accounts about the accounts), it is also necessarily impossible for any particular account to be complete and anything other than partial – in both senses of the word. We have all become intelligence analysts sorting through more data than we can absorb with – and this is one of the recurring themes of the book – what are proving to be inadequate resources for adjudicating amongst the diverse array of narratives. We have become, in a sense, like the intelligence analysts overwhelmed by a tsunami of information or the market researcher trying to make sense of the exploding data “troves” they have created and captured.

In this regard, an era of information overload does not merely change our understanding of how much information is available to us; it also corresponds to changes in the way we think about the role of information in our economic, political, and social lives. This book is, in large part, about the nature of these shifts. If it is, indeed, the case that a growing number of people, from intelligence analysts to citizens, are facing the prospect of unprecedented access to mediated forms of information, then it is worth exploring the ways in which people are adjusting to a changing understanding of how information is treated in a data-saturated world.

Unsurprisingly, one of the characteristic responses to the perceived surfeit of information has been the cultivation of techniques for cutting through the information clutter – shortcuts for managing large amounts of information without necessarily having to delve into, engage with, or even understand it. These techniques vary greatly according to one’s position with respect to the database: data miners, for example, have access to resources for storing and sorting large quantities of data that are not available to the typical worker or consumer. Nevertheless, the data miner and the Web surfer are united by a common logic – the need to make sense of a welter of information for the purposes of decision-making. The following chapters will explore a range of diverse responses to the challenge of making sense of information in an era of data surfeit – one in which traditional models of representation and comprehension are called into question not just by the sheer volume of data, but by a reflexive awareness of its incompleteness: its partiality.

These approaches to the challenges posed by information overload range across disparate realms of social practice but share a unifying thread: the attempt to find a shortcut that bypasses the need to comprehend proliferating narrative or referential representations, whether these are in the form of descriptive data, first-person accounts, or expert analysis. The range of approaches covered in this book is meant to be indicative, rather than exhaustive, and includes the following: data mining and predictive analytics (which automate information processing and displace explanation with correlation); sentiment analysis (which purports to translate emotional response and individual opinions into machine readable data that can bemined); prediction markets (which replace credentialed expertise with aggregate demand and calls this wisdom); body language analysis (which privileges immediate bodily reactions over the vagaries of narrative content) and neuro-marketing (a form of body language analysis that requires special equipment).

These strategies for cutting through the information clutter vary widely in terms of the resources and techniques they draw on, not least because managing large amounts of data can be an expensive and resource intensive proposition. At the same time, they are united not just by the problem they address – how to make sense of more data than can be fully understood or absorbed (or, and I will argue that this is a related development, how to bypass the contrived character of representation) – but also by the solution they envisage: an attempt to bypass or short-circuit the problem of comprehension and the forms of discursive, narrative representation upon which it relies. This might sound at first like a somewhat opaque formulation, but it is one that will become clearer with the help of the examples and case studies that follow.

Because information is crucial to the functioning of any society – and widespread access to information is an important aspect of a democratic society – the shifting information environment has important consequences for questions of power and politics. Thus, the following chapters will consider the societal implications of a new information landscape in which only the few have access to the infrastructure for storing and making sense of large amounts of data. It will also consider the political implications of the challenges to traditional models of sense-making posed by a reflexive awareness of the partial character of mediated forms of representation.

The Changing Landscape of Information and Power

Once upon a time, in an era of relative media and data scarcity, the political control of information relied upon attempts to define and reinforce dominant narratives that accorded with the interests of those in power. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s famous formulation in The German Ideology captured this version of ideological control: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas ... The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production … therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas.”⁸ This understanding of the relationship of ideas to power meant that attacks on dominant interests relied at least in part on challenges to the dominant understandings of the world upon which they depended. Similarly, economic control of information meant securing the most accurate and up-to-date information about prices and the variables likely to affect them. In still another register, police control of information meant targeting wrongdoers: finding the evidence to identify, catch, and prosecute lawbreakers.

In an era of information glut, however, new strategies of control emerge alongside these: in the political realm, information control over information no longer necessarily depends upon sustaining a dominant narrative; in the financial realm, as in that of policing and security, data collection leads to large-scale strategies of correlation, prediction, and pre-emption that would have been impossible in the pre-digital era. This shift, to the extent that it accurately characterizes a changing relationship between ways of knowing and forms of power, heralds a reconfiguration of our understanding of the political implications of challenges to dominant narratives – of the efficacy of “speaking truth to power.” It also augers a changed understanding of the role played by data in managing markets and securing the population – themes that will be taken up in subsequent chapters.

Consider an example from the political realm, in which the proliferation of narratives and counter-narratives, of fact-checking and critiques of fact-checking, can all work to multiply the available accounts of reality to the point that it becomes difficult to adjudicate between them based on the constantly moving evidence. The George W. Bush administration relied on a proliferating tangle of multiple and conflicting narratives to manage the revelation that US troops in the initial stages of the Iraq invasion had failed to secure the huge weapons cache at the Al QaQaa facility – a site that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had repeatedly warned the administration about, describing it as “the greatest explosives bonanza in history.”⁹ The revelation of the missing explosives, coming as it did in the midst of the 2004 presidential campaign, might have been devastating to Bush, whose administration had, despite repeated warnings and its alleged goal of discovering “weapons of mass destruction,” apparently allowed some 380 tons of high-grade explosives, ideal for the purposes of concealed, portable bombs, to fall into enemy hands, providing ample armaments for an extended and violent resistance.

The way the administration handled the revelation, which it had tried to keep under wraps by preventing the IAEA from inspecting the site, was instructive: rather than providing a “dominant” narrative of what had happened, it did its best to exploit the fog of war to throw up a series of often contradictory explanations. This might be described, following the philosopher Slavoj Zizek’s invocation of Freud, as the “borrowed kettle” alibi of power. The term refers to the multiplication of contradictory narratives refuting apparent facts: confronted with the fact that a borrowed kettle was returned with a hole in it, the person accused of breaking it responds with several mutually contradictory excuses: “there was already a hole when I borrowed it; the hole wasn’t there when I returned it; I didn’t even borrow the kettle.”¹⁰ Such forms of narrative multiplication have become a hallmark of the media strategy of what might be described as the postmodern right for handling political debates that they appear to be losing, such as that over climate change: global warming does not exist; even if it does exist, it is not caused by man-made activity; if there is global warming it could have beneficial effects (longer growing seasons, etc.); the world is actually getting cooler, etc.

With respect to the case of the missing explosives, administration officials early on conceded to reporters that in the confusion of the initial invasion (and the frenzied search for weapons of mass destruction – WMDs) the troops had apparently failed to secure the Al Qa’Qaa site. One administration official told the New York Times, in its initial story, “It’s not an excuse ... Bu...