How to thrive in an age of information pollution – the case for information wellness

On the internet we drink our information from a firehose. For this, we pay an inordinately high price, as our brains – optimised by evolution to live in small tribes and communities, to deal efficiently with immediate life-or-death threats and to make effective decisions from a small number of choices – react to the over-stimulation in ways that are not always in their own best interests and are occasionally self-destructive.

We live in an era of information pollution.

This is distinct to an era of information excess.

Humans have lived with information excess for the last 12,000 years, when the first Agricultural Revolution caused us to move from hunter gatherer tribes to larger communities and settled societies based around larger-scale agricultural practices. That move heralded the start of an era where humans outsourced some of their knowledge to other humans – in the tribe most people knew most things, whereas in the community, knowledge was distributed across a broader group of people.

This move towards knowledge abstraction accelerated throughout the subsequent revolutions of Urban, Iron, Scientific and Industrial. However, it was during the Information Revolution in the late 20th century that the acceleration moved into hyperdrive, becoming exponential and leaving those of us living in its aftermath navigating a world with more knowledge than we can never know, more video and audio than we can ever watch or listen to, and more books than we can ever read.

As if all of this isn’t already challenging enough for our brains (optimised for a very different world), there is a final part of the jigsaw, which exposes the gap between excess and pollution.? Excess describes a situation where more information exists in the world than any one individual can possibly know, whereas pollution refers to an environment where this information surfeit is exploited by the powerful for their own gain – by spreading the pollution and profiting from our self-defeating responses.

Enter stage left the largest repository of information the world has ever known and enter stage right some of the fastest-growing companies the world has even seen, socialising content and getting fat and rich on growth and engagement. This heady cocktail has resulted in an online content environment that rewards us with as much dopamine and serotonin as we can handle in return for our attention.

This environment brings an immediate threat to our personal agency. The online world tempts us to live low-agency passive lives, devouring a starter of unfulfilling clickbait, a main course of amusing banality, and a dessert of outrage at others who don’t share our views. All the time we’re just a dinghy on the ocean which has lost its sails, getting buffeted around from one external stimulus to another, unsure and maybe even uncaring about the journey’s destination.

The high-agency approach to managing information pollution is to see it for what it is and be deliberate and conscious about dealing with it.

By default, our brains use the decision-making circuitry which helped us thrive in the tribe (fight or flight, negativity bias when evaluating threat, in-group favouritism, short-term gratification over long-term gains, pattern-matching leading to superstition-led decision-making) to survive in the modern global village. We retain our agency therefore by overriding our default tribal responses with our intentional global-village ones, such as the following:

Embrace blissful ignorance

The firehouse produces 500 hours of YouTube video every minute, nearly 50 million Facebook story shares every hour and 500 million Tweets every day. It’s therefore by definition impossible not to be ignorant about most things. This truth frees us, as it empowers us to be deliberate about our ignorance. Retaining agency means being intentional about goals, setting information boundaries and embracing the trade-offs which recognises the need to sacrifice banality to keep focused on the good stuff.

Identify and deal with overwhelm

When we are deluged with information, we default to bias and the comfort of reinforcement. We absorb unchallenging cosy content, whether that’s the video which shows our guy owning the other guy, or just a good old-fashioned cat video. “Getting lost in cat videos” is the new “what did I come upstairs for” for those of us of a certain age. The following user journey is much too relatable – what’s the weather tomorrow / [ picks up phone ] / oh look a squirrel / cat video / another cat video / [ sets down phone ]. There should always be time in life to watch cats being evil, but our content diet needs more than triviality.

Pursue information wellness

We increasingly recognise the importance of looking after our brains and the impact that mental fitness plays in helping us lead happy and productive lives. We are rightly encouraged to invest in social connectedness, exercise, quality nutrition, adequate sleep, to spend time in nature, to be present each moment, to learn and create, to give and to share.

More than ever, information wellness needs to go on this list.

I’m not an information puritan and I’m not arguing that we should only consume the most highbrow of content. Rather I am lamenting the loss of agency we suffer when we cede control of our content diet to platforms which don’t have our best interests at heart. Regulation can improve this, but only we can fix it.

If I might bastardise a well-known quote of Francis Bacon, the internet is a wonderful servant but terrible master.