The Endangered Critical Process in the Digital Age

Today marks my 8-year anniversary of blogging. I have learned so much from it and want to thank everyone who has engaged in the comments over the years. I am particularly grateful for comments that are critical and for ones that provide links to additional material. The reason is that those help move my thinking forward. They are part of the critical process through which knowledge improves over time (of course the occasional compliment or thanks are also much appreciated).

We should not take the critical process for granted though. It is easy for that process to break down, especially in our age of exploding and fragmenting digital media. Here are some of the ways I see it breaking down:

First, there is so much content out there that people can spend all their time just confirming their pre-existing biases. My graduate student colleague at MIT Marshall van Alstyne predicted such an outcome in his paper on “Cyber Balkans.” Of course this effect is further re-enforced by filter bubbles as Eli Pariser documented so well in his book.

Second, the effort to spread information is now much smaller than the effort to understand it. That results in frequent information cascades. People see something and instantly hit re-tweet, re-blog, re-pin, re-whatever without thinking or questioning the content.

Third, it is hard online to see the person behind the statement. That leads to a lot more talking past each other and yelling at each other. That’s particularly true in environments that allow for drive-by anonymous interactions.

Fourth, attention is scarce. That means people have to buy it. They can do that either by spending money (eg buying followers, traffic etc) or by being willing to say outrageous things that will get picked up and shared widely for being outrageous. That strategy is clearly working well in the current Presidential election cycle.

I notice all of these effects first hand on my blog and on Twitter. For instance, if I want something to get a lot of engagement and retweets I have to write a provocative headline and take an undifferentiated position that’s either clearly for or against something or someone. Posts exploring both sides of an issues and coming to a differentiated conclusion get a lot less attention.

Now the answer to this cannot and should not be to turn off comments, withdraw from Twitter, stop blogging, etc. But we do need to collectively explore how systems can be designed to support the critical process. For instance, we should figure out how to build an opposing view reader (apparently I can use Nuzzle for that and will try that). And individually we need to do our part to help maintain the critical process. So next time you are about to hit retweet on something containing a link — take the time to click through and read what it actually says. Or when you are leaving a comment ask yourself whether it is constructive or just yelling.

The critical process is also at the heart of a well functioning democracy. And given the challenges we are facing we will need both more than ever.