Why You Feel the Way You Do

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With a majority of American workers now paid to churn out data, we have generated a morass of expert information that has started to undermine logical approaches to deliberation and problem solving. The endless analysis is so overwhelming, it's difficult to know how and when to make decisions.

The statistical anarchy freezes us in our cerebral tracks. The psychological reaction to such an overabundance of information and competing expert opinions is to simply avoid coming to conclusions. "You can't choose any one study, any one voice, any one spokesperson for a point of view," explains psychologist Robert Cialdini. "So what do you do? It turns out that the answer is, you don't do anything. You reserve judgment. You wait and see what the predominance of opinion evolves to be."

As the amount of information and competing claims stretches toward infinity, the concern is that we may be on the verge of a whole new wave of indecisiveness: paralysis by analysis. In this way, technology brings with it yet another internal contradiction: as it speeds up our world in the name of efficiency and productivity, it constricts rational thinking.

The Two-by-Four Effect
In a glutted environment, the most difficult task is not getting one's message out but finding a receptive audience. As psychologist Stanley Milgram explained in 1970, individuals adapt to stimulus overload by allocating less time to each input, blocking reception whenever possible, and installing filtering devices to keep the number of inputs down to a manageable level. Metaphorically speaking, we plug up our ears, pinch our noses, cover our eyes with dark sunglasses, and step into a bodysuit lined with protective padding.

But that is not the end of the story. Inevitably, someone wishes to attract the attention of our overloaded, well-protected subject. Intuitively, the communicator responds to the new barriers with barrier-piercing countermeasures. In order to make contact with the person wearing earplugs, he raises his voice. To catch the eye of the person with sunglasses, he uses brighter lights. To make an impression on someone wearing a lot of protective padding, he gives that person a whack on the head. The predicament has become so common that there's already a popular American expression for it: "I had to hit him on the head with a two-by-four to get his attention."

And so it is that our glutted society is victimized by what we might call the "two-by-four effect." The two-by-four effect provides humanity with a way to keep communication alive in a glutted environment. But in so doing, it extracts a hefty price: society, as we all know from experience, is becoming inexorably more crass. We are witnessing the new reign of trash TV, hate radio, shock jocks, tort litigation, publicity stunts, and excessively violent and sarcastic rhetoric.

Historically, discourteousness and vulgarity have always signified a lack of sophistication; garishness was considered tasteless and degrading. In today's attention-deficit society, however, people have learned that churlish behavior is the key to headlines, profit, and power. Outrageous behavior by individuals is rewarded with wealth and influence.

Information technology has transformed the general public into a giant lay media, and in so doing, it has also bestowed upon us "glutizens" the quintessential media burden: to grab an audience. Everyone wants to be heard (or read or watched). If the media are now us, then we all have the same problem of trying to get attention in a world full of glutted, distracted people. Since we are at once victims of the glut and glutizens who contribute to it, we are simultaneously casualties of the two-by-four effect and its patrons.

As such a desensitizer, the two-by-four effect may also freeze out some of our best minds from the mainstream of public debate. If one has to be sensational and dramatic to gain attention, what does that portend for the insightful, brilliant minds whose ideas don't lend themselves to MTV videos or flashy Web pages? If our attention naturally gravitates toward the Madonnas and Howard Sterns of the world, who gets left behind in the dust? Ironically, the two-by-four effect suppresses those individuals whom we most desperately need in our complex times--the people who are willing to confront life's ambiguities.

David Shenk lives in Brooklyn.

Copyright © 1997 by David Shenk. From the book Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut, by David Shenk. Reprinted by arrangement with HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

More on Data Smog

• Smog Lifters: Tips to cut through info deluge from Tripod's Bo Peabody, author Andrew Tobias, MIT's Nick Negroponte, and more
• Data data: statistics from the front lines of the information glut

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