Information Pollution Alert! Living with Data Smog

We are a nation awash in data smog. This is more than just information overload — it'due south non but that there'due south as well much information out there for i person to fairly encompass, it's that there'due south too much information out in that location to even make out the information clearly, let lone to evaluate and deed on that data.

What's worse is that different normal smog, which is the unintentional byproduct of our need to burn things to provide energy, much of the information smog is intentional. We aren't supposed to be able to see conspicuously! Between pernicious advertising, ideological pronouncements, and allegedly entertaining "infotainment products", we're beingness bombarded with data explicitly intended to irksome out senses and distract us from articulate thinking about important matters.

This is non a conspiracy theory — it's straight out of Marketing 101! Rational, considering actors make lousy consumers; deliberation and cautious evaluation muck up the democratic procedure; disquisitional assay makes the powerful look foolish. Marketing wants none of that! No, far better to appoint the impulses, to feed the primal emotions of fear and longing, to go in and out in the blink of an middle.

Hither'due south a couple of examples:

Impaired Parents (Don't) Rule!

Picket a kids TV prove recently? Watch a few? You might have noticed a trend — dumb parents. Uncool, hapless, clumsy, dorky, way-out-at that place dumb parents. Call back the parents of yore? The Bradies, the Cleavers, even the Wah-Wah-Wahing parents of the Charlie Chocolate-brown universe? They were pretty with it — voices of sanity and potency in an adult world kids struggled to grasp. Not any more — today's TV parents are hopeless.

Why? Because that's what media producers' customers want. Non the kids — viewers aren't customers, they're production. You don't buy Jimmy Neutron. The advertisers whose spots fill the commercial breaks during Jimmy Neutron purchase you — the cartoon is just a manner to get enough of y'all watching to make it worth the advertisers' buck. Well, not you — your kids. You're but a wallet with legs — what they really desire is to show your kids really cool stuff that they'll get you to purchase. And of course, you're going to say "No". That's where the show'south content comes in — your kids have just spent four hours learning that parents are uncool idiots who say "No" to all the coolest stuff.

Pay no attention to the scientist behind the curtain…

Why would an oil company like Exxon-Mobil fund global warming enquiry? Anyone with half a brain knows that they're only going to publish research that's favorable to them. Why would a tobacco visitor fund research on second-paw fume? Again, it only takes a 40-watt encephalon to realize that their results are going to be biased in their favor. Yet both petroleum companies and tobacco companies spend millions on inquiry that nobody can possibly have seriously.

They don't practice it for honey of science, obviously. Nor do they exercise information technology to convince you, or me, or anyone that smoking's salubrious and called-for coal saves penguin lives. They hire scientists and churn out biased research to muddy the waters, pure and elementary. Knowing that oil companies pay scientists to put out bogus climatic change research calls into question the objectivity of all scientists — who'south to say that the scientists saying that burning coal is bad for the surroundings aren't merely every bit biased as the petroleum-backed scientists saying information technology's not? Certainly not you lot — you're no scientist! It's perfectly logical, and then, to conclude that "nobody knows for sure" and that it'south all just a political trip the light fantastic.

Dealing with data smog

Amid all this fear, uncertainty, and doubt-mongering, ane thing'south absolutely sure: it's going to become worse. And I don't hateful "it's going to get worse before information technology gets improve"; it may never get better. As more than and more than ways for data to reach us become prevalent (there will exist more and more apps for that!), there will exist more and more ways to obscure what'southward important amid what'southward urgent, like buying things.

And so we have to learn to deal with it, to sort through the come up-ons and the panic-inducing attacks and notice the information that actually makes our lives better. Hither's a crash course in smog survival:

• Go educated: The most of import step in dealing with data smog is to build upward your mental toolkit, and that ways getting educated. There's a reason that Jefferson saw didactics equally the cornerstone of a functioning democracy.
• Share your ideas with others: Community can be a groovy protection from malevolent information. Tell people what you're thinking to avoid the repeat effect of standing alone in a tunnel, where just you hear your ideas coming back to you. All of a sudden "I'k going to buy a sports auto" doesn't seem similar such a great way of dealing with your pattern baldness, does it?
• Winnow news sources to one or two trusted daily sources (local and national newspaper, for example) and three or four less frequent belittling sources (magazines, mostly). In their quest to differentiate themselves, news outlets pour on all sorts of gloss and glitter (everything except actual assay, information technology seems), but they're actually reporting the aforementioned stuff as everyone else — probably from the same wire. Get what you need and move on.
• Learn marketing techniques: Learn what makes your news sources and other information sources attractive to their customers (advertisers) and take that into account. Read up on how marketers practice their job, so you tin can place when marketing techniques are being used on you lot. Try Robert Cialdini'southward classic Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion for a practiced primer.
• Follow the money: Find out who paid for research and what the payers' goals are. Well-nigh bookish books and articles list this in the acknowledgements (for books) or the footnotes (for articles); for mainstream books, yous may take to check the references.
• Follow the interests: Ask who a story seems to help, and how.
• Consume critically: Ask yourself if the reverse determination is possible, and how your source deals with that possibility. Biased sources normally ignore or belittle opposing viewpoints, instead of engaging them. Only it's rarely likely that the other side is stupid or in some sort of conspiracy.
• Does it matter? Perchance this should exist the outset thing you enquire, about anything. It'southward easy to get caught up in things that ultimately don't matter. That'due south OK if you're simply having fun, but not much to build a life on.

This isn't annihilation like a comprehensive response to data smog — at best information technology'due south Information Smog 101. But information technology's a first — and we need a commencement, considering the alternative is getting less and less informed about the real world around the states. Maybe y'all accept some ideas? Allow's hear 'em in the comments.

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Source: https://www.lifehack.org/articles/featured/information-pollution-alert-living-with-data-smog.html

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