Information overload

How it works

Your attention is finite. Your feed is not. The economist Herbert Simon put it in one sentence back in 1971: a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. When more arrives than you can process, you do not process it more slowly. You switch to shortcuts. The headline instead of the article. The feeling instead of the check. The team instead of the evidence. Research on fake news suggests that most people who fall for false headlines are not reasoning badly on behalf of their side; they are simply not reasoning, because there is no time.

That makes overload a weapon. RAND’s 2016 description of the Russian propaganda model, the firehose of falsehood, has four features: high volume across many channels, fast and repetitive, no commitment to truth, no commitment to consistency. The last two are the point. After a passenger jet was shot down or a defector poisoned, state channels released not one story but a dozen contradictory ones. The goal was never to make you believe a particular version. It was to make you conclude that nothing can be known, and stop looking.

You do not need a state to run this on a small scale. A scandal breaks, and within hours partisan pages on every side publish their own explanation, their own villain, their own “what they are not telling you”. In a debate, the Gish gallop buries one opponent under fifty claims. In your feed, the whole internet does it to you, daily. The Reuters Institute found that around four in ten people now say they sometimes or often avoid the news, and about as many feel worn out by it. Exhaustion is a predictable product, and some people are happy to make it.

Example

@breaking_now_24, 3h Train derailment near the city: sources say foreign-funded activists cut the signals. Authorities silent.

@clean_slate_news, 3h Train derailment: the maintenance contract went to a minister’s cousin. THAT is why. Share.

@headline_hub, 2h Derailment: driver was drunk / it was a software bug / it was a cyberattack from abroad. Developing.

@judy.m, 1h Honestly, I give up. Everyone has a different story and they’re all sure. Who even knows anymore.

Notice that the last user has done exactly what all three pages, on different sides, were hoping for. Not one of them has posted a source, and one has posted three incompatible claims in a single sentence.

Why it works on you

• Shortcuts are what a tired brain has left. Under load you do not become biased so much as lazy, and lazy evaluation defaults to familiarity and feeling. Emotional hijacking gets easier the more exhausted you are.
• Contradiction feels like proof that truth is unknowable. Ten incompatible explanations do not mean the truth is hidden; usually it means nine of them are made up. But the feeling is “nobody knows”, and that is the feeling cynicism grows from.
• The feed creates a duty to have views. Every story arrives with a comment box. You feel you should have a take on all of it, today. You do not. Nobody does.

What to do

When ten stories hit at once: pick one claim and trace it. One. The SIFT method takes about a minute per claim: stop, check the source, find better coverage, trace it to the original. Everything else can wait, and most of it will have quietly disappeared by tomorrow.

When you catch yourself giving up: notice the sentence “who even knows”. That is the firehose working as designed. Replace it with “I don’t know yet, and here is who I would trust to find out”. Fewer, better sources beat more sources every time: a couple of outlets with corrections pages and named reporters, read once a day, will leave you better informed than a feed read all day. Choosing those sources on purpose also keeps you out of an echo chamber, which is the other place tired people end up.

In a comment section: you are allowed not to have an opinion today. Say so, out loud. “I’m waiting for an actual source on this” is a legitimate contribution, and it gives the people reading permission to wait too.

Don’t confuse it with

• Being busy. Overload is not about the amount of news in the world; it is about what you do with your attention. A fast news day handled with one good source is fine.
• Complex stories. Some events really do have several causes. The difference is that honest coverage says “we don’t know yet”, while a flood says “it was definitely X” in ten different ways.