Algorithmic Indifference: Seeing More, Feeling Less

Further readings on the age information overload, mass desensitization and dehumanization, and how we can exercise our agency to navigate this.

I posted this note a little over a month ago, and this thought has stayed heavily present in my mind since. I felt this incessant need to understand why everyone acts as if the world isn’t on fire. It turns out that the amount of information we have access to, the contexts in which we consume it, and the systemic failures of entities in positions of power have created a perfect recipe for collective cognitive and social dissonance. We are simply not built to navigate this—our evolution could never keep up with the one of this digital era—but we can give it our best try.

I could sit here and tell you that stepping away from the news occasionally and regulating your screen time is the solution, but I would be lying to you. It surely helps, but with these readings, I wanted to make sure that we are addressing the root of the issue, because how can we manage something we don’t understand? Additionally, I believe that if we want genuine change, we need to accept this reality rather than turning a blind eye to it—that’s partly why I believe we’ve reached this point. This matter isn’t just about limiting information intake, but deciding how we navigate our lives—both on and offline—to reclaim our attention, our agency, and most importantly, our humanity.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau. Dante and Virgil, 1850.

Welcome to this month’s installment of Further Readings, where each month I share a list of resources and reflections through which we can go down a rabbit hole together. The main goal here is not just to provide a media guide, but to provide a starting point for the process of questioning.

Below, you’ll be able to find not only a compilation of resources comprised of books, essays, podcasts, documentaries, and more. You’ll come with me as I dissect them and organize them into the bigger picture so that we can turn knowledge into actionable behavior through the following structure:

1. Information Fatigue

2. Engineered Indifference

3. Embodied agency

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Given that there’s no media roundup today, make sure to check out the last installment of Things To Do Instead of Doomscrolling over on Perfectly Imperfect. This one is titled Renewal, where I share a few things and rituals that have helped me shed some dead weight I’d been carrying to get ready for a new phase of my life <3

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1. Information Fatigue

Before fully diving into the why, we need to understand the what. This phenomenon, which we can call information fatigue, isn’t something new. I found it relevant to lay out a base in which we understand what it means today, while recontextualizing foundational works relevant to the subject through a more contemporary lens.

Information Overload: an overview by David Bawden and Lyn Robinson (2020)

This is an academic overview of what information overload is through a wide scope of exploration. I found this paper to be the most complete and insightful to easily understand this concept. Its integral approach provides a well-rounded and objective perspective, which is exactly what we need to embark on this massive task of attempting to decipher why we have gone numb.

The paper provides an introduction to most of the themes that we’ll explore further down. Specifically, though, some key concepts that were introduced here were hyper-history and infosphere; these are the connecting threads that link the consumption of information with absolutely everything else:

“However, as society fully experiences Floridi’s Fourth Revolution, and moves into hyper-history (with society dependent on, and defined by, information and communication technologies) and the infosphere (a information environment distinguished by a seamless blend of online and offline information activity), individuals and societies are dependent on, and formed by, information in an unprecedented way, information overload needs to be taken more seriously than ever.”

In this paper you’ll find the following:

• Introduction

• History of Overload

• Nature of Overload

• Causes of Information Overload

• Is Overload Real?

• Information Poverty

• Consequences of Overload

• Solutions to Overload

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin (1935)

I first encountered this very influential essay because it was heavily referenced by Berger in Ways of Seeing—it essentially provides the framework necessary to understand what the reproduction of images entails. He defines the crisis of modern art as a dilution of “aura,” which turns images into ubiquitous information. This dilution is directly evidenced in the way that we process images—far beyond just art—because of both medium and accessibility.

He states that “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” It’s not the same to see a picture of the Birth of Venus than going to the Uffizi Gallery and stand in front of it to experience all of its dimensions, just like it’s not the same to watch clips of people’s homes being bombed in your social media feed than being at the site of the explosion. This dilution is furthered even more when we are constantly exposed to similar horrific scenes, but also regular access to the lives of others, which results in their humanity being diluted into content.

Benjamin obviously only refers to older forms of mechanical reproduction, like film and photography; however, it paves the way to question the value and impact of images through the mass reproduction and consumption that occurs in the vastness of the digital world. Beyond that, this essay provides foundational insights into the history of visual language, its connection to ownership and authenticity through both social and political perspectives.

Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World by Herbert A. Simon (1971)

This section is directly taken from my Further Readings installment titled Reclaiming Our Attention: Exercising Agency in the Age of Distraction. Both installments are inextricably linked, so if you decide to upgrade your subscription, you’ll have full access to that one as well :)

Herbert A. Simon was the Nobel prize-winning economist and psychologist who coined the term attention economy for the first time in this paper. Even though the term came to be before the technological boom of the internet and social media, this concept has come to be vastly relevant in this era of information—and disinformation—overload.

In this paper, he argues that the abundance of data in an information-rich world creates a poverty of attention, creating a need to allocate this attention efficiently to be able to navigate this overabundance that consumes it. He proposes a design in which—since humans can only attend to one thing at a time—filtering systems or information condensers that absorb information instead of producing more.

In hindsight, this became more relevant than ever because we did design filtering systems of information, such as search engines, social media, and the algorithms that run our lives on a larger scale. However, Herbert saw these as a way for businesses and governments to operate more efficiently toward socially beneficial progress, but instead, it is now largely used to maximize profits at our expense. I find this thought to be perfectly encapsulated by breaking down the following quote:

“In a knowledge-rich world, progress does not lie in the direction of reading and writing information faster or storing more of it. Progress lies in the direction of extracting and exploiting the patterns of the world so that far less information needs to be read, written, or stored. Progress depends on our ability to devise better and more powerful thinking programs for man and machine.”

I don’t believe we are prioritizing creating better thinking programs for men to access the information held by machines; instead, machines are getting better thinking programs to access our information. Once we outsource choice and our ideas of truth to machines, our information gets exploited by corporations to manipulate our attention and ultimately, maximize their profits.

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