News Media, Social Media, and Collective Intelligence

DECEMBER 6, 2019

If you turned on a news broadcast in the 1960s or 70s, you'd be greeted by the warm, reassuring voice of Walter Cronkite dutifully summarizing world affairs. The world on which Cronkite reported was hardly uneventful; it included, among other things, a war, a moon landing, and the assassination of a president. But one feature of Cronkite's program now seems surprisingly quaint: the sign-off. Each night, he'd wrap things up with: "That's the way it is." If this pretense to tidy synopsis now seems laughable, it is because we find ourselves in a media environment that undermines any clear sense of "the way it is." One reassuring voice has given way to millions of dissenting opinions.

Without suggesting anything sinister, we can think of journalism as a means of democratic control. Good journalism helps coordinate the vast collective intelligence of a democratic populace by sourcing, processing, and disseminating relevant information. Traditional media functioned in a centralized, broadcast mode; ideas flowed from a few authoritative sources, mostly in one direction.  As analyst Martin Gurri notes, this dispensation was predicated on conditions of scarcity: where information is scarce, sources become authoritative. Our own time bears out the inverse proposition: where information is abundant, authority erodes. So too does attention, as Herbert Simon famously warned:

“In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention..."

From the individual to the societal scale, we are plagued by questions of who to trust and what to pay attention to. The challenge, however, is that the genie is already out of the bottle. There can be no return to a world of information scarcity, nor to the stable authority of a centralized broadcast media. Even authoritarian regimes trying to control information now do so through systematic distraction. As James Williams writes, "the really important sort of censorship we ought to worry about pertains less to the management of information, and more to the management of attention." What's more, a decentralized collective intelligence with abundant information is, at least in principle, far more powerful and agile than any centralized model could hope to be. The question, therefore, is not how to reassert centralized control over our sensemaking. Rather, it is how to steward the transition to a decentralized collective intelligence that actually orients toward truth.

At present, the algorithmic infrastructure orienting our collective intelligence has different goals in mind. Sources and pieces of content are rewarded for their ability to divert attention, but not for their ability to prompt ongoing reflection. The article I retweet out of momentary outrage is indistinguishable, at the level of Twitter's metrics, from the one I share because it provoked a sea-change in my worldview. Thus my individual susceptibility to distraction is propagated up to the level of the algorithm, which in turn sets the priorities for our collective conversation, propagating back down to the minds of individual users. This is not a mere inevitability of human nature; where the properties of the medium promote sustained attention (as with podcasts), thoughtful conversation flourishes. It is a matter of which aspects of human nature are brought out by the technologies we use.

Effective collective intelligence depends on two seemingly contradictory features. One is the connection and engagement required to remain relevant and responsive to the challenges of the day. The other is the rigor and remove necessary for critical, open-ended experimentation and reflection. One of the Psych of Tech Institute's goals is to bring this lens to academia, harnessing researchers’ expertise by building networks with industry and policy. Part and parcel of this view is that, in a world as complex as ours, no single discipline or institution sees the full picture. None of us has a full purchase on "the way it is." But by staying connected and alert, we can discern a path forward.