News-Finds-Me Perception
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There are a great many theories about how best to learn a skill or body of knowledge.
Some research has indicated that focused, intentional learning methods are optimized by pairing them with more casual, unguided, incidental learning: casually socializing over drinks while speaking a language you’re trying to learn at school, for instance, or soaking up facts about a topic you’re researching via a topical comedy show.
There’s speculation that part of the value in this combination of learning approaches may be found in the creative correlations that are often formed in less-structured environments.
Rather than simply knowing facts, incidental augmentation to the learning process can help a person flexibly apply certain types of knowledge, making freewheeling connections they weren’t taught in their more formal, educational setting.
There’s an increasing body of research, though, that suggests incidental learning may not always be so valuable—at least in some contexts.
The news-finds-me perception refers to a way of thinking that seems to be amplified by the media ecosystem in which many of us find ourselves in the modern world.
Whereas once we would have had to intentionally seek out and consume data about contemporary issues, today, our inputs are flooded with news and news-like information. As a consequence, we may be less likely to intentionally seek out and consume such information, instead assuming that the news will find us via the tools we use for communication, entertainment, and content creation/curation.
This assumption is unlikely to be conscious for most of us who make it. Instead, our habits change as the technologies we use on a daily basis change, and with them, our habits related to learning about the world change. Information about current events makes up some of those data points, but not all of them.
That said, the nature of the news, representing up-to-the-minute environmental data—the environment in question rapidly expanding over the past several decades to include not just our own city or region, but the entire world—has evolved in the interim, as well. And alongside the news itself, the mechanisms through which we receive such content have also changed, optimizing, at times, not for accurate data-delivery, but for other ends.
Social media platforms, for instance, algorithmically determine what we see based on what is most likely to get us to “engage” with content they show; which in practice means news and news-like content that seems more likely (according to what they know about us from our past behaviors) to result in comments, shares, likes, and posts of our own.
Such engagement is the bread-and-butter of these corporations’ business models, as they represent monetizable chunks of behavior they can show as evidence to advertisers of there actually being people on their platform, doing things and seeing ads as they do those things. So it makes sense, from a business standpoint, that they might try to optimize for these ends.
Unfortunately, one knock-on effect of such optimization is that we’re not necessarily shown the most educational, or even accurate, bits of news or news-like content.
On the contrary, many of these algorithms have been shown to optimize for the most emotion-stirring version of any story, in many cases opting for non-news over news, because we users are more likely to respond in ways they can measure and profit from if we’re emotionally engaged, rather than intellectually engaged.
The end result of this relationship is that these sorts of inputs often flood our digital environments with content, but that content is more likely to be “engaging” in ways that make us outraged, upset, or tribal, than they are to be enlightening. Which is a stark contrast from what most of us would probably expect from intentionally sought-out and consumed news content.
After spending enough time in informational ecosystems flooded with information, however, it makes sense that we might cease to expend energy on looking for news at all, because we’re already so supersaturated with what seems to be news, as it is.
The news-finds-me perception, then, is a perception predicated on an informationally overwhelming environment that disincentivizes intentional exploration and information consumption, replacing that behavior with passive ingestion of less reliable substitute content.
It’s as if the food we used to eat has been replaced by mass-produced substitutes that taste like food and are sold to us by food vendors, but which almost completely lack any nutritional value: no vitamins, no minerals, no fiber or protein; just corn syrup-based sugars and a stomach-filling sense that we’ve eaten something, so we don’t need to find and consume anything else.
There’s a hint of the Dunning-Kruger Effect in this perception, as part of what keeps us from seeking out more accurate and valuable information is the sense that we already know everything we need to know. It’s partially a sense of information overwhelm, but partially a secure, if false perception of possessing knowledge that we don’t actually possess.
Whatever the causes of this perception, though, there’s a growing body of evidence that it influences everything from our individual mental model of the world and how it works, to our political choices—including our participation in democratic institutions like voting.
The theory is that people who believe they know a great deal about politics, but who actually do not, will base their opinions about government and the political world on very superficial things, and thus will often fail to grok the contribution they might have to the process, and why that contribution might be important.
Context is built from small data points that, individually, may seem insignificant, but which on scale help us understand what’s happening around us.
If we lack such data points, only passively glimpsing vital concepts through the lens of viral videos, Twitter-rants, and angry social media commentary, our context will be unbalanced, misshapen, vulnerable to manipulation, and perhaps so flimsy as to be practically nonexistent.
There’s no single, proper way to learn about the world and retain that information in such a way that we become knowledgable about it.
But it would seem that although incidental learning may be valuable in helping us absorb and apply some types of knowledge, in other cases—or if it’s used to the exclusion of more focused, intentional learning—it can leave us in some ways even worse off than if we had remained entirely ignorant.
Enjoying Brain Lenses? You might also enjoy my news analysis podcast, Let’s Know Things.
There’s also a podcast version of Brain Lenses, available at brainlenses.com or wherever you get your podcasts.