Maxwell's Demon and the Golden Apple: Global Discord in the New Millennium

7. Rising Entropy at the Micro Level: Information Overload and the Advent of Truthiness

7 In the midst of information’s increased quantity and speed of transmission, modern people may feel, as psychologist and philosopher William James did in 1899, that an “irremediable flatness is coming over the world.” This is not to suggest that the world is becoming flat in Thomas Friedman’s sense of greater connectivity and a more level global playing field, though this is partly occurring . Flatness here refers, instead, to a general sense of banality and loss of meaning in life. Information rains down faster and thicker by the day. Rather than a heightened sense of stimulation and awareness, information overload produces boredom and alienation.1 Why? The answer lies in the field of economics—the study of how to allocate scarce resources. What is scarce in the information economy? Certainly not information; we’re drowning in that. What is in short supply is human attention. As the economist Herbert A. Simon explains, a “wealth of information creates a poverty of attention .” This is because 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.”2 Thus, modern society suffers from collective attention deficit disorder, and this problem has migrated to the front of our cultural awareness . No matter how much we pump up our brains to superhuman levels with drugs originally intended to treat Alzheimer’s and narcolepsy or by means of Rising Entropy at the Micro Level Information Overload and the Advent of Truthiness Rising Entropy at the Micro Level 123 “brain-training” games like Cogmed or Lumosity, we remain terminally distracted by Google, tweets, e-mail, power browsing, iPhones, Blackberrys, Kindles , iPads, RSS readers, Netflix, cable television, Firefox tabs, and Flickr photostreams . Finding our way in today’s world requires effective strategies to allocate our limited attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. Just as human beings must learn how to drink from the fire hose, organizations , too, must figure out how to usefully and efficiently process the enormous quantity of information that either flows their way or that they themselves collect . The U.S. National Security Agency alone intercepts and stores nearly two billion separate e-mails, phone calls, and other communications every day. “The complexity of this system defies description,” lamented John R. Vines, a retired army general who reviewed the Defense Department’s portion of the intelligence last year. “We consequently can’t effectively assess whether it is making us more safe.”3 The larger point is that wisdom does not come from greater quantities of information at our fingertips. Personal Worlds Grounded in Truthiness The more information is repeated and duplicated, the larger the scale of diffusion , the greater the speed of processing, the more filtering of messages, the more kinds of media through which information is passed, the more decoding and encoding and so on, the more information becomes noise. This is what is known as information entropy: the degradation of information through monotonous repetition and meaningless variety. Just as matter and energy degrade to more probable, less informative states, the more information processed or diffused , the more likely it will degrade toward meaningless variety akin to noise, information overload, or sterile uniformity. Information entropy is, in this sense, a measure of the degradation of information as a result of its transmission. The high noise levels and distortions of signals associated with information entropy are emblematic of the hugely encoded digital age, where information is lost, distorted, buried in noise, irrelevant, ambiguous, complicated, cluttered and overloaded. Consider the effects of the infosphere: the “million-channel media universe” of talk radio, cable television, and the Internet (YouTube and the blogosphere). With so many contradictory “facts,” “truths,” and “informed opinions” being hurled at the public like free food on a cruise ship, people everywhere can essentially select and interpret facts in ways that accord with their own personal, 124 Maxwell’s Demon and the Golden Apple idiosyncratic, and often flat-wrong versions of reality. Knowledge no longer rests on objective information but rather on seductive “true enough” facts. A truth pocked with holes but one that is “true enough” will nonetheless hold sway over those who choose to believe it because it feels right. This is what the comedian Stephen Colbert calls “truthiness,” the belief that...