Someone was asking me recently what I thought about a certain new technology product, and while generally familiar with the brand and the product and able to speak intelligently on the topic I was not completely well versed. The product, a small pocket camera was just not a class of product I had been following.
On the scale of the few hundred dollar product which this other person had already bought the consequences of me not being superbly informed were low. But what about in other cases where the stakes are higher?
It is an oft cited refrain that the average person living in 16th century England consumes less information than is printed in the 2013 Sunday New York Times. Regardless of how true this is, it highlights how much information is being created every day and how much of that is being consumed for individual’s consumption.
I know there are only so many hours in the day, and I can only consume so much information and still do my job (which is to produce information.)
When asked about this camera recently, I began thinking about what I cannot consume, either by choice or by a function of time. In do so I remembered a tweet from Joshua Benton, director of the Neman Lab from a few months ago:
@palafo Thesis: The web has exploded the illusion that it’s possible to be well informed about all things one “should” be informed about.
— Joshua Benton (@jbenton) July 26, 2013
He was describing in greater detail a book he would like to write (which if he needs a co-author I am available) on “the power of intentional, tactical ignorance.”
Being uninformed about a camera is small-time, the world will neither rise nor fall about on my being well-informed on a Samsung product. There was no fallout from me only being aware in the most general sense.
But what about ill-informed voters voting against their own interests? Alternatively a lack of information leading people to make poor product decisions, these could be small products like $300 cameras or financial products like mortgages and investment products.
Benton’s brief description challenges us to think that the Web forces users to distribute the resource of our time to a limited number of topics, balance depth versus breadth.
In a pre-Web era I could count on the people I interacted with daily to see the same news broadcasts and read the same newspapers daily as I did As a result we could all speak with relative ease and approximately the same level of information on the same topics. In a post-Web era all bets are off.
Media is infinite, there is no guarantee that I will see the same media as the friend I will meet for drinks after work other than the probability that we will both consume the same mainstream publications and consume enough similar stories.
Of course, what we choose is ultimately self-selected. And what we do not choose is part of our “tactical ignorance” in that we, the user chose not to be informed on the topic. We, and I deliberately include myself, either choose to to seek out information or choose to not to click a link effectively deleting that topic from our media diet.
It is more than sounding smart at parties, or doing well at bar trivia night when world events is a topic. This is about society and communities being informed about themselves and connected to each other.