Information Anxiety

Leo

Well-known member
maybe the level of partisanship makes it less interesting or bearable nowadays, for me anyway. Rachel Maddow and the Guardian can bug me almost as much as Fox News. even when I share their views, I feel like I've been dragged into the bubble because it's all so one sided. I might mock the trump base for living in a bubble of their own reality, but plenty of woke folks are in the same situation.
 

version

Well-known member
It isn't what the thread was originally about, but 'information anxiety' seems about the best term for the anxiety I experience over generating information myself.

There's this constant back and forth between wanting to communicate and hating putting myself out there. It doesn't matter what I'm actually saying, just the thought of my opinion on a film or my shoe size or whatever existing out there somewhere irritates me, but rendering myself mute is also frustrating.

There's a frustration with language too. Everything reads like impersonation or parody and just adds to the noise.

I was thinking about this stuff scrolling though Letterboxd last night. Who are the reviews for? If they're for yourself then why post them publicly? If they're for other people, why are so many of them so lazy and frivolous? Why the desire to catalogue the films you've seen? Where's all the data going? What use is there for it?
 

catalog

Well-known member
I think it's some kind of innate urge to catalogue/sort/order/organise. Something that comes into being as soon as you have information. I don't know why exactly, but it serves a multiplicity of reasons, all the ones you've outlined above really. A way of keeping tabs on things, of discovering new things, of pointing others to what you've done. A way of organising the world. Libraries basically. Libraries come into existence at the same time as there is a big enough amount of given x information.

I can't really say much beyond that though, which I think is what you are really asking.
 

version

Well-known member
It's interesting that even someone like Burroughs, who explicitly warned people and told them to 'turn off the machine,' couldn't resist publishing his thoughts, going on TV and sticking information out there.

I've noticed this with conspiracy-minded people online too. They're aware of the issues with 'Big Tech', 'Big Data' and what have you yet still have Twitter and Substack and Letterboxd and podcasts and whatever else.

I understand that some things you can't entirely opt out of, e.g. you can't really use cash exclusively at this point, but you don't need to have Twitter.
 

version

Well-known member
I imagine some of this anxiety's due to how little choice there is over more serious things like medical appointments.

I don't stand there agonising over whether to sign in on the touchscreen when I go to my GP or the hospital as I don't have a choice, but I will agonise over something trivial like using Twitter because it's entirely up to me whether I use it.
 

catalog

Well-known member
It's interesting that even someone like Burroughs, who explicitly warned people and told them to 'turn off the machine,' couldn't resist publishing his thoughts, going on TV and sticking information out there.

I've noticed this with conspiracy-minded people online too. They're aware of the issues with 'Big Tech', 'Big Data' and what have you yet still have Twitter and Substack and Letterboxd and podcasts and whatever else.
I was listening to a Jasun horsley podcast today about exactly this issue, in reference to his book about Kubrick. Basically the same line about not giving too much credence to stuff you think is wrong, but in talking about it constantly, you nevertheless popularise it more.

He's got this thing about kubrick being a bad filmmaker but in doing the analysis, he says he's got trapped himself. Big more complicated than thst, maybe you'll be better at working it out.

It's reminiscent of foucault and history of sexuality, society is ostensibly not talking about sex but inadvertently doing it all the time.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
It isn't what the thread was originally about, but 'information anxiety' seems about the best term for the anxiety I experience over generating information myself.

There's this constant back and forth between wanting to communicate and hating putting myself out there. It doesn't matter what I'm actually saying, just the thought of my opinion on a film or my shoe size or whatever existing out there somewhere irritates me, but rendering myself mute is also frustrating.

There's a frustration with language too. Everything reads like impersonation or parody and just adds to the noise.

I was thinking about this stuff scrolling though Letterboxd last night. Who are the reviews for? If they're for yourself then why post them publicly? If they're for other people, why are so many of them so lazy and frivolous? Why the desire to catalogue the films you've seen? Where's all the data going? What use is there for it?

But nobody knows who you are.
 

version

Well-known member
But nobody knows who you are.

It's not just about people or the present though. Who knows what machines might be capable of in the future. One fear's that all this seemingly trivial data may one day be able to be used to know you better than you know yourself.
 

Leo

Well-known member
It's not just about people or the present though. Who knows what machines might be capable of in the future. One fear's that all this seemingly trivial data may one day be able to be used to know you better than you know yourself.

@suspended would approve. you'd get the most relevant online ads thrust upon you at every turn, which is really all that matters.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
It's not just about people or the present though. Who knows what machines might be capable of in the future. One fear's that all this seemingly trivial data may one day be able to be used to know you better than you know yourself.

You should ask Droid for some tips, he's Mr Invisible
 

shakahislop

Well-known member
there are way too many green circles talking to one another in this thread, the three most prolific green circles in fact, how am i supposed to remember who is who
 

sus

Well-known member
@suspended would approve. you'd get the most relevant online ads thrust upon you at every turn, which is really all that matters.
Let me state my apparently objectionable beliefs, which somehow run against the eternal anti-tech narrative:
(1) That servers for data storage and compute cost money to run. This one is pretty uncontroversial.
(2) That websites require engineers to build. Pretty uncontroversial also.
(3) Engineering is both relatively difficult and in-demand, so wages are high. More controversial, but still I think roughly correct. Might change in the future with machine learning.

Now, given these starting points, it seems clear that someone has to pay for websites. You could socialize/nationalize everything and have taxpayers pay it! Or, less dramatically, you could just run it in our current market economy and charge users.

Some websites have decided to charge for their services. This has worked OK for media providers (music + vid streaming) but for whatever reasons, has worked abysmally for social media. I worked at Are.na, and we desperately pushed very affordable subscription prices ($5/month), and their engineers were paid abysmally & did it for the love of the product/users, and we still could barely break even. People do not like paying for websites. This is another belief/premise of mine, feel free to argue it.

So, if we aren't going to nationalize the web, and everyone refuses to pay for it, where does the money come from? Users have voted with their feet: consumers have already voted their preferences. It's not that *I* like ads. It's that users have, through their behavior, demonstrated that *they* prefer ads. This is just how it is.
 

sus

Well-known member
Given all this, would I prefer a small number of highly relevant, and indeed, frequently useful ads, that tip me off to products I actually want, over a large number of spammy, popup ads that have to trick you into clicking, because of how useless and stupid and irrelevant to my life their products are?

Without question.
 

sus

Well-known member
People go around in circles outraged over "big data" without realizing that they are the ones in control. If they, and consumers like them—and these days everyone & their mother is faux outraged over tech's "big data" collection—didn't want ads and data tracking, then ads and data tracking wouldn't exist. People have created their own monsters, wanting to eat their cake & have it to. And then when they find, upon eating their cake, nothing's left, they scream outrage and scapegoat "big tech."

It's very, very silly and I would hope that everyone on this board has sense to see past it.
 

catalog

Well-known member
It's cos we are now ambivalent about the Web generally and concerned that our heads are being shit into too much. And the payment model that is not advertising does not make sense to anyone. I don't know why that is. I agree if everyone paid a little, you'd probably have a better product and less shit to deal with. But for some reason the upfront ongoing payment is not what people go for. Maybe if it got bundled in at Internet service provider level or something and that was regulated but we are too far gone for that. Something like a licence fee as you have for the bbc but nod even that is very contentious here.
 

sus

Well-known member
Yes, well, it's like anything—the criteria of selection & survival, i.e. the rules of the game, determine play. "Hate the game, not the play." And the criteria of selection & survival, in a capitalist marketplace, are consumers themselves. It's their indifferences to big data, or to low employee wages, that leads to data tracking and poor wages. Companies that ignore customer preferences are outcompeted by those who do. Yes, this is simplified but is roughly the way of the world.
 

catalog

Well-known member
I'm reading this book which is on about the historical idea of the commons in terms of land use. I think that's the way the Web needs to be thought of. Sort of the Lawrence lessig/Aaron schwartz model? Might be getting my wires crossed here a bit. I think of dissensus as a bit of a commons. Little oasis in amongst a tough environment where there's a lot of vultures.

Im personally past caring about the tracking and all that. But I hope those words don't come back to haunt me.
 
There are now daily examples of why information anxiety is valid, though in a special set of circumstances. Russian mobiks crawling around dodging and not dodging tiny bombs dropped by drones, all captured in 4k. Or sending selfies back home that show enough of their location to bring in a HIMARS strike. Personalized airborne doom is so hot right now.
 

sufi

lala
Yes, well, it's like anything—the criteria of selection & survival, i.e. the rules of the game, determine play. "Hate the game, not the play." And the criteria of selection & survival, in a capitalist marketplace, are consumers themselves. It's their indifferences to big data, or to low employee wages, that leads to data tracking and poor wages. Companies that ignore customer preferences are outcompeted by those who do. Yes, this is simplified but is roughly the way of the world.
tsk tsk tsk we have been over this already: wikipedia and web archive, open source and creative commons, and 🔥 the rest
 
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