by Nick Bilton
He continued, this time taking a fair jab at me: “The Internet and the devices it’s spawned are systematically changing our intellectual activities with breathtaking speed, and more profoundly than over the past seven centuries combined. It shouldn’t be an act of heresy to ask about the trade-offs that come with this revolution. In fact, I’d think asking such questions would be an important part of the job of a media critic, or a lead Bits blogger.”
He even paid me a backhanded compliment, saying that if a Luddite is someone who fears technology, a “Biltonite is someone who celebrates all technological change.”
I’m not quite that dogmatic. But his view reminds me of an assessment made in the mid-1990s by Marc Prensky, a software creator who has argued that all kinds of technology should be incorporated into schools and education. To Prensky, there are two camps of Internet users: digital immigrants and digital natives. The natives were born into a world where virtual interaction was commonplace; the immigrants, born before the Internet spread, have had to adapt to its ways.
Over the last five years I’ve noticed two things that distinguish digital natives from digital immigrants. First, digital natives unabashedly create and share content—any type of content. They aren’t satisfied merely having information and aren’t at all slowed by doing the creating themselves.
If you have children, you’ve probably seen the digital natives’ creative thinking and need to document. If you watched the inauguration of President Obama in 2009, you will have seen this too. As the president awaited his swearing in, his ten-year-old daughter, Malia Obama, sat behind him taking pictures with her digital camera. There were literally hundreds of thousands of people taking pictures of that event—pictures of Barack Obama would appear on the front page of almost every newspaper and news website around the world—yet his daughter wanted to document the event through her own eyes.
Moreover, digital natives do not distinguish between mainstream stories in the mainstream media such as newspapers and television and those created by their peers. Natives also differ from immigrants in the way they deal with the unbelievable amount of content available to them online.
The digital immigrants came of age reading traditionally packaged information. They felt assured that all the news that was fit to print would be just that: neatly organized, hierarchical, and presented in a specific place on the page. A neat bundle of paper would be on their doorstep when they woke up in the morning, and it would take thirty minutes and a cup of coffee to get through it. Other products existed as thirty-minute TV shows, two-hour movies, and 250-page books. Consumers and creators didn’t just switch places. Many people became comfortable with those packages. Packer had a point when he said he felt the need to yell stop. The traditional packages many digital immigrants have grown comfortable with are slowly crumbling.
Now, with so much online, old rules are being smashed and splintered, but new rules are yet to sift out. As mainstream content started to appear online, mainstream packaging didn’t quite make the jump. Each day, from 150 to 600 new stories, commentaries, and blog posts are added to a single news site such as nytimes.com, compared with about 150 stories in a newspaper. Mix this with all the sites we see daily and there’s too much to consume, with no concise way to organize the ever-growing pile. There aren’t any neat little packages.
For digital immigrants—technically, I’m a borderline immigrant—the feeling of being overloaded can be overwhelming. There is simply too much stuff and not enough time to consume it. In recent years, that feeling was compounded as I increasingly was recruited to more social sites by friends and coworkers. Every new interesting blog or website was added to my list of new reading material, and as those digital piles grew, a gradual panic set in—very much like George Packer’s anxieties about information overload. I felt like I was being buried alive in an assemblage of words, data, pictures, and status updates. Like E. B. White’s digest readers with Irtnog, I wanted—needed—to read everything and felt an inescapable anxiety about missing something important.
The Anchors of Your Online Life
Digital natives, I realized, don’t feel this anxiety because they have solved the information overload problem; I have also.
It took me a while, but eventually I realized why: Our social networks are what I call anchoring communities that serve the same purpose for the online world that Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities did for the nation. Instead of creating a boundary for a nation, as Anderson’s work theorized, these anchors create a boundary in the abyss of the Internet. They help us manage the information overload that traditionalists have come to fear on the Web. Whereas Packer sees an information hell in getting brief updates from dozens of people, I see it in the opposite light: Without my social network to anchor me online, I would be in an information hell.
Nationalism was the glue that held Anderson’s imagined communities together and enabled people to think of themselves as Italians, Germans, and Americans. In our digital life, anchoring communities play a role similar to that of nationalism in Anderson’s imagined communities.
Why? Because creating anchors helps people feel part of a community while helping them navigate the digital never-never land. Anchors may seem like just another term for a social network, but they are more than that. The first social networks were not designed to help solve the problems of information overload or to narrow down content; they were meant to be essentially glorified lists of acquaintances—old friends, new friends, friends of friends, and people who used to be friends. Social networks were designed to share status updates, pictures, and eventually news articles. Unintentionally, they have become our online safe havens, our anchoring communities.
Sure, some people still use these social services to tell friends what they’ve eaten for breakfast, but generally, we’ve taken the sharing to a whole new level, exchanging expertise and insight and helping one another decide what’s important and what is merely digital fluff.
By offering their own digital links and connections, anchoring communities help us cope with the massive numbers of people and the incalculable amount of information online and give us neatly refined selections to sift through together. They help us contain information overflow. These social networks provide cognitive road maps that help us navigate all that information and help relieve the mental taxation of trying to manage excessive information on one’s own.
These anchoring and sharing patterns began with America Online’s Instant Messenger in the late 1990s. People would copy and paste interesting links of dancing babies, funny animated images, or interesting websites into the instant messages they exchanged with friends and family. Soon those shared nuggets moved to e-mail, then to social networks, which are the boats and moorings of our anchoring communities.
Those broad networks became our content villages. Each individual in these communities brings information to share. Each person decides who visits, who moves in, or who is excluded from their circles. Collectively, we delve into the mass of information.
The social networks help us with this by cutting to the chase. Twitter asks “what’s happening?” and Facebook entices you to share “what’s on your mind.” Granted, sometimes the response is a rather pointless “I need a shower.” But when the answer is breaking news about a major event or an intriguing find, our communities may help us start a meaningful discussion and, in many instances, get the information in front of us almost instantly.
Here’s how it has changed my experience: For a long time, when I first went to my computer every morning, I would open up a dozen or more different windows to get a handle on what was happening in the world. I had a Google page, nytimes.com, wsj.com, Yahoo!, and so on. The amount of information scrolling across my screen was completely over the top and, often, redundant.
Now, in the mornings, I go to Twitter. There I can look at highlights from whoever I choose to follow. Here’s what might come in during the time it took to write this paragraph: My colleague Jim tweeted
an update to an earlier story about an oil spill. A friend I met at a conference once, Chris, sent a link about a new blog post on Facebook’s confusing privacy policy. My wife sent a link to a foodie blog she’s reading. Another coworker shared a video of Jon Stewart. The links might be from the New York Times, CNN, FOX News, individual journalists, friends, random bloggers I’ve never heard of, or my neighbor. All of them will sort out significant, interesting, or relevant stories for me, essentially providing my own individual package. I share my finds in the digital flea market in the same way. I still go to specific websites in the morning—the Times, Gizmodo, Brooklyn’s Brownstoner, and others—and when I find an interesting article from the hundreds I see, I send it to my community in a reciprocal gesture. I don’t get paid for it and neither do they, but we help one another navigate the mind-boggling amount of information available on the Web.
Take, for example, an event that took place in my neighborhood. A robber was shot by the police while I was on vacation. My neighbors and friends living in Brooklyn sent up-to-date messages online describing the event almost as it happened. None of these people are reporters or trained journalists, but they were all telling a story and sharing information as if they were on a deadline and receiving a paycheck for their information dissemination.
The Web-Wide World
You might think that these social networks lock us all into a tiny close-minded bubble where we all live in niche silos, unable to see anything but the views that align with the people we interact with online. People who only follow liberals on Twitter will only see liberal views, one might think.
After all, before the Web existed, most of us read a single newspaper in the morning, probably one that was aligned with our political views. We didn’t really have the option of reading different newspapers from other locations, either—imagine trying to get a copy of the Seattle Times if you lived in New York twenty years ago! It might have taken a week, nothing remotely like the single click that we use today. In the past, the limitation on our ability to see a breadth of options was cost and the difficulty of distribution.
The idea that we exist in a segregated bubble in any community is called homophily—or, in more plain terms, “birds of a feather flock together.”
Past research has shown that we tend to align ourselves with like-minded individuals: We sort by income level, age, neighborhood, or similar political or other interests. But on the Web, we see drastically more opinions and viewpoints than we do in traditional media such as television and newsprint.
A paper by Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro published in April 2010 through the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business argued that the Internet is not only breaking down barriers to different viewpoints but also driving us to see things that we never would have seen otherwise.6 This is a stark contrast to previous thinking. In 2001, Cass Sunstein, an American legal scholar, penned an article in the Boston Review, arguing that our communications were moving rapidly toward a world where “people restrict themselves to their own points of view—liberals watching and reading mostly or only liberals; moderates, moderates; conservatives, conservatives; Neo-Nazis, Neo-Nazis.”
But online, Gentzkow and Shapiro found in studying Internet traffic, most news consumers get their information from multiple news outlets—even ones you don’t expect they would see: “Visitors of extreme conservative sites such as rushlimbaugh.com and glennbeck.com are more likely than a typical online news reader to have visited nytimes.com. Visitors of extreme liberal sites such as thinkprogress.org and moveon.org are more likely than a typical online news reader to have visited foxnews.com.” After reviewing archival news data back to 2004, Gentzkow and Shapiro found “no evidence that the Internet is becoming more segregated over time.”
I can tell you firsthand that thanks to my anchoring communities, I see a drastically wider range of viewpoints online than I’ve ever experienced reading a print newspaper, watching the nightly news, or reading select niche magazines.
Over the last couple of years, these anchoring communities have changed the way I receive and share almost every piece of content and information I consume. My reliance on—and participation in—social networks and the anchoring community they provide hastened my transition from cable TV to a computer hooked up to my TV, from a landline for a telephone to an all-mobile household, and from print books and newspapers to digital readers. I moved to the new systems because I want everything I encounter and take in to be shareable, amendable, and receivable.
It’s not about watching Saturday Night Live on cable TV versus watching it online; it’s that the people I share information with will cut the best clips out of the latest episode and share them with me. In the same respect, I don’t want to be like my grandmother and clip articles from the paper and mail them; rather, I want to share the two or three interesting articles I find on nytimes.com each day electronically with everyone who shares news with me.
As a result of this kind of thinking, I no longer feel a shred of information overload, content anxiety, or fear that I might be missing something, online or off. Just as those of the print generations feel calmed when their morning newspaper is in hand, I feel confident about my anchoring communities.
The mountain of information available online will continue to grow, and the more information there is, the more likely we are to feel uncomfortable about not having full access to it. No one can possibly hope to eat all the bytes, snacks, and meals being created online. If the thoughtful packaging of information blogs that editors and publishers provide is still too much, our anchored communities will help us manage and edit the overload and provide us with a rich vein of stories.
As these anchors evolve, we will refine them, making important choices about who we believe in and when. At the same time, marketers, search engine providers, politicians, and others will be trying to figure out how to tap into our unique communities to get our attention. How we will know and decide what to trust in the future going forward will become more important—and more complex.
4
suggestions and swarms
trusting computers and humans
The information you get today is coming “more and more through your friends and through your social network. It’s being distributed through channels of trust and the trust isn’t necessarily the BBC or The New York Times. It’s people.”
–BJ Fogg
Trust Markets
When I want to know the answer to a simple question—when a movie star was born, what the history of a social movement is, how to fix a technical problem—I put the question in a search engine and “Google” it. More often than not, some of the top listings are from a site such as Wikipedia or Yahoo! Answers or a message board, created not by experts but by people like you and me who want to share their insights and knowledge.
One of the great challenges of this massive, morphing, growing universe of information is knowing what you can trust and what you can’t, even among your anchored communities. This job will get more difficult as clever marketers, technology companies, and others use elaborate computer models to find ways to answer or even anticipate our questions and needs in the future.
Because we come to just about everything with some kind of bias, we may initially trust something solely on the basis of its look or point of view. Liberals may love the New York Times’s editorial page but may be appalled at the Wall Street Journal’s opinion page, and staunch conservatives may shudder at just the thought of the Times’s opinions. Our level of belief and assurance in something determines how we interact, share, and consume it.
In my work at the Times and my teaching at NYU, I’ve been part of many discussions about the value of community-based content found in the likes of Wikipedia and message boards, where the broad Internet community supplies the facts. Even though the wider community is constantly reviewing, double-checking, and revising entries on these sites, many worry—for good reason—about how much you should trust such unknown, unprof
essional sources and how you can trust the search engines that take you there.
More and more we are asked to trust a computer, too. Some of the sources we add to our anchoring communities are generated by software bots that use in-depth algorithms to find and highlight interesting news items. An example of this kind of algorithmic reporting is a technology website called Techmeme, which automatically monitors hundreds of technology-related news sources. The site is essentially an ever-changing front page of technology news based on how recently an article was posted, how many times other blogs and news sites have linked to it, and the relevance of the topic on that specific day. Some humans are involved, but only a smidge, monitoring and bringing a little bit of judgment to what appears on the page, and the rest is decided by a computer algorithm. Alltop.com, which pulls together the top stories posted on many different sites, is another aggregator of information. For my colleagues and me, these computer sources are completely credible. I trust the algorithms, often more than statements or claims and press releases sent out by public relations firms, since the computers are seeking information from a variety of reputable news sources. My anchoring communities offer another level of vetting.
Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, which handles 65 percent of all Web searches, sees our peers as important in parlaying trustworthy information since we trust them. Schmidt understands that our online communities and their personalized suggestions hold more sway in a search result than does an algorithmic computer search, which is exactly the same for each individual. Just as Foursquare wants to harness your friends’ recommendations of restaurants or bars, Google, YouTube, and others hope to do the same for any search result on the Web.
