This week, I wanted to pick up on a thread from last week’s ramblings - the idea of option paralysis. The basic meaning is the hesitance and uncertainty that comes with the modern encounter with technology and digital society. Limitless access to information can cause a crippling force against choice and decisiveness because it gives rise to virtually infinite options. For an extrapolation, I quote Ben Weinman, the guitarist of The Dillinger Escape Plan, who explains the concept that spurned the album of the same name:
The internet and mobile access to social networking has given us access to information at unprecedented and ridiculous levels. This recalls my musings on aporia back in week 6. This is an aporia with technology. We have what is essentially an infinite number of potential encounters with new information, with respect to the finite number of hours that can be spent online.
This is in contrast to a time period in the very recent past when it was impractical for private households to have personal computers and wireless internet access. The amount of information that is freely available to public users has ballooned exponentially in only a few years. This is what Ray Kurzweil describes as “the knee of the curve” in his futurist writing (The Singularity is Near, 2005.)
Because of our short lifespans and short memories, we all tend to view progress as more or less linear. It’s difficult for us to remember or access a frame of reference that extends backwards in time by more than a few years and make meaningful comparisons. As an example from my own experience, I can remember the iterative progress from our family’s first CD player - an unwieldy brick of technology that was slow to load and prone to skipping - to my portable CD player barely larger than the disc it played which could be shaken and even dropped without skipping. Pretty impressive, but it’s hard to gauge an actual “rate” of progress based on these improvements.
Even though it’s fairly obvious that the pace of technology is accelerating (consider the decreasing interval and increasing functionality between generations of smart phones), even the view that things seem to be speeding up as we go forward is a massive understatement of the actual situation. This gets us back to Kurzweil’s idea of the “knee” of the exponential curve that our technological progress is drawing across the plane of history.
The basic explanation of this notion is that the pace in areas such as information technology and processor speed are expanding in on a logarithmic scale, rather than on a linear scale, and they are pulling along all related facets of technology and access to information. Using a simple decimal example, if the pace of technology was linear and it took 1 year to add 100 gigabytes of hard drive space, in 2 years, the original value will have increased by 200 gigabytes. However, since the pace is exponential, there is an upward trend to the speed which creates a positive feedback loop to “steepen” the curve. Using a similar example, if it takes 3 years to increase the capacity of a hard drive by a factor of 10, it will only take 6 years to subsequently increase the capacity 100 times. If the original capacity was 10 gigabytes, it would carry 100 gigabytes in 3 years, and almost one terabyte within 6 years.
This brings me back around to the original premise. Easy access to indefinite realms of information technology makes it incredibly difficult to allocate time appropriately, or even to have a good idea of what the appropriate allocation might be. I currently have 6 tabs open at the top of my browser. Ask me about allocating one’s time and resources carefully...
I can’t remember who said it, but I heard a quote recently that resonated with me on a pretty fundamental frequency: We’ve sacrificed knowledge in the name of information. I think that one of the greatest challenges of this era (or maybe I’m projecting my own great challenges on our era) is to discover a way to filter the information into useful knowledge, rather than getting swept away by the current of the information explosion and losing our way in its trends.
I’ve written about the internet and technology a fair bit - it’s a recurring theme that anybody who reads this blog will have figured out by now. What makes it so interesting to me is the question that I keep coming back to: how do I avoid option paralysis in the face of the incredible force and traction that gives massive networks the power to pull people along in their wake?
How many times have you seen some version of this phrase: “...if you support _________, post this in your status.” Or perhaps, one of my personal favourites, “sign this online petition to support/discard/sustain/improve ______________”. It’s persuasive to think that participation in online discussions of real-world issues is sufficient to affect change, and I’m as guilty of it as anybody. Take, for example, this blog. Just bits and bytes on a digital page.
I believe that the best way to take full advantage of the explosion of information technology is to exploit its potential to bring people together in real-world environments to share what they’ve learned online. It requires dedication and discipline that I do not always have in sufficient quantities, but it’s something I’m working on. We’ve seen it give rise to amazing social movements like the Arab Spring and the ongoing Occupy Wall Street movement, and it can only get bigger from here. I’m incredibly excited by the possibility of opening public dialogue and making revolutionary movements out of the capabilities that information has given us. I hold up these movements as a brilliant example of how to overcome option paralysis. Let’s not allow technology to become a substitute for living. Let’s make it a way to enhance it.
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P.S. Please go listen to "Option Paralysis" by The Dillinger Escape Plan. Srsly.
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