Most of us have had a dream like this—many of us often. We are totally unprepared for the final exam. In my recurring version, I have forgotten that I am registered for an advanced technical course and I have no choice but to take the final. The textbook I’ve not yet opened is 400 pages of arcane equations, and there are six hours until the exam. I’m panicked; there is no way that this is going to work.
Our brains can process only so much information. If we exceed our cognitive threshold, we panic or shut down or find ourselves in the biological equivalent of a computer system’s crash. At least, that is our common understanding.
But, dreams aside, our common conception of our own info-sorting abilities turns out to be fundamentally wrong. The evolved human cognitive system has an extraordinarily sophisticated capacity for ignoring, filtering, and occasionally purposefully selecting information. (From time to time, some of us stand in awe as we witness multitasking students.) Most of the time this capacity serves us very well. We can concentrate on one conversation among dozens within earshot at a gathering. We can find the passage we seek by scanning an article quickly.
There is a small and active literature on information overload in psychology and organizational sociology. The key variable turns out not to be an abundance of information but rather a scarcity of time. The critical examples usually involve fighter pilots and military field commanders who have to make life-or-death decisions in split seconds with multiple streams of information providing often conflicting cues. Thankfully, that isn’t the kind of potential information overload we confront from day to day. In most of the routine communication environments we face, we tend to perceive the growing abundance of channels and sources of information simply as greater choice, richer resources, attractive options—no reason at all for white knuckles and a furrowed brow.
My research team at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor has been studying the flow of information into the typical American home from 1960 to 2005. We are trying to understand both how the flow has evolved and how citizens are exercising their powerful capacities for selective attention in monitoring the mass-mediated world around them. This work picks up from a project started at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by Ithiel de Sola Pool with the principal findings published in the early 1980s.
Pool, who died in 1984, and his colleagues carefully tracked the growth of radio, books, television, newspapers, telephonic communication (even faxes), and postal deliveries to the home, all measured as the total number of words (print) and minutes (broadcast and telephone) available and actually consumed from 1960 to 1980. Print media were relatively constant in price and in quantities of supply and demand; but electronic media were declining in price per word and growing rapidly in usage for this period. Media consumption was growing at a compounded rate of about 3 percent per year, and media supply at a compounded rate of about 8 percent a year. It appeared, given the clear limitation of a 24-hour day, that at some point a disjuncture between supply and demand would be evident. Our Michigan team decided to take a look.
We picked up where Pool left off, using the same basic methods and industrial data sources for media supply and demand to extend the analysis up to 2005. We included broadcast, cable, and satellite television; broadcast and satellite radio; newspapers, books, magazines, theatrical motion pictures; vinyl recordings, cassette tapes, and CD recordings; VCR, DVD, and DVR video; portable audio; video games; telecommunications; direct mail; and, of course, the Internet.
The focus of our analysis is the ratio of media supply to media demand—the disjuncture that seems likely to arise from a nearly exponential growth in supply and a modest linear growth in consumption. The ratio of supply to demand in 1960 turns out to have been 98. That is the number of media minutes theoretically available in the typical American household in 1960 divided by the number of minutes of actual consumption. (In this calculation, all print media have been converted to a metric of minutes by using the average reading speed of American adults.) Such a ratio represents a fundamental metric of choice. And it is a human-scale choice.
In 1960, per home, there were typically 3.4 television stations available, 8.2 radio stations, 1.1 newspapers, 1.5 recently purchased books, 3.6 magazines, and so on. It was relatively easy for one to know where the country-music station, the public broadcasting station, and the rock station were on the radio dial. It was a situation that, with habits, labeling, and radio-button setting could be intuitively managed by the human cognitive system.
But if we take the ratio of supply to demand in 2005, we find a very different metric: 20,943. That is, more than 20,000 minutes (about two weeks) of unique mediated content theoretically available for every minute of every day. (And that ratio doesn’t include the variety of sources and channels available over the Web—the Web is counted as a single channel available 24 hours a day in 59 percent of American households and in active use in those households, on average, for about an hour and a half in 2005.)
We calculate Web access by the traditional method for assessing media competition—as a single alternative choice to television or reading. But in point of fact, the Web offers an intimidating, essentially unlimited variety of sources and channels. Google, for example, reported monitoring approximately 8.5 billion “Web addresses” in 2005. In our view, that is not a human-scale cognitive challenge; it is one in which humans will inevitably turn to the increasingly intelligent digital technologies—search engines, TiVo’s recommendation systems, collaborative filters, and so on—that created the abundance in the first place.
We have come to characterize this trend as a shift from push media to pull media. In the traditional push-media environment, the newspaper editors tell you what is important in bold-print headlines. The cineplex at the mall provides you with a limited number of the latest major studio theatrical releases. You have some choice, but the list is small and predetermined by industrial norms and professional judgments.
But consider for a moment the unadorned Google search box—the quintessential exemplar of a pull medium. It is the ultimate answer machine. You can ask virtually anything, and it has more than 8.5 billion resources to draw from. It is true that the most popular Web sites pop up first on Google’s lists, but that is a function of the collective behavior of the online community—what other Web sites link to—not a preformed elite consensus on what is important.
Pool was right to speculate about a coming disjuncture between information supply and demand, but the disjuncture turned out not to be a social problem characterized by information overload and withdrawal. Instead, the growth of intelligent and collaborative search and filtering technologies extend the natural capacities of human selective attention with increased leverage.
We reported on our findings in a series of focus groups with American adults from around the country. We described the growing information flows in recent decades and the daunting ratio of 20,943 to 1, and then asked them to tell us how they felt about it. We asked what emotions came to mind when they thought about such things.
“Pleased”; “happy”; “not surprising”; “of course”; “only 20,000 times? I thought it would be larger”; “I love the choice I’ve got, to watch what I want when I want to”; “who doesn’t want more choice?”
We asked if they were satisfied with the results they got from Google or whatever search engine they used. They reported finding what they wanted, usually on the first page, often among the first few listings. Happy campers on the whole, with only one volunteered remark in 10 referencing any concerns about overload or the good old days of a mere three TV networks’ programming our evening’s diversion.
A 2008 cover article in The Atlantic asked provocatively: “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The premise of the piece seemed to be that the instantaneous response of the Web to our every query was making us, well, not so much stupid as impatient, no longer able to concentrate on “long stretches of prose” and the various “turns of the argument.” Toward the end of the article, the author suggests coyly that maybe he’s just a worrywart and a bit of a curmudgeon—like Plato’s Socrates, who fears that the invention of writing will lead us to neglect our capacity for memory and become forgetful. That may be the article’s most persuasive sentence. It is, nonetheless, probably a good thing that somebody is worrying and raising concerns.
The dynamics of mass communication (and interpersonal communication) are changing. The natives, so far at least, are far from restless. They love their smartphones and online videos. Given the uncharted attentional dynamics of looking at the world though a Google search window, our next study, now under way, compares mainstream headlines and prime-time offerings with the information that pops up in response to Web searches. The digital citizenry may be content with the information it retrieves, but is it any better informed?
I wonder. But perhaps I’m just being a worrywart and a bit of a curmudgeon.
