Ms. Adverthinker

Is our increasingly technological media world giving us so much information that we are distracted from pursuing independent and in-depth knowledge? It appears that our country’s president believes that. In May, President Barack Obama gave a commencement speech at Hampton University in which he, the very same president that leveraged online information channels to win his current post, said:

“‘You’re coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don’t always rank that high on the truth meter,’ he told the students. ‘And with iPods and iPads, and Xboxes and PlayStations – none of which I know how to work – information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation. So all of this is not only putting pressure on you; it’s putting new pressure on our country and on our democracy.’”

President Obama seems to be criticizing the media, technology, video games and the internet in one fell swoop, lumping it all into an “information” category. When did having access to more information become a bad thing? Is not good to hear many sides of a story so we can form our own opinions? And if the information comes to us in an entertaining way, doesn’t that just make us engage with it more?

The discussion that sprung on the internet following this speech was surprising: while many were quick to defend the technology, most agreed with President Obama and felt they were constantly attempting to manage information overload, with no time for processing and understanding. This brought to mind the two-year-old The Atlantic article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (which has developed into a book just released this month entitled The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (see the Ms. Adverthinker review of this book here) Some highlights from the article supporting President Obama’s opinion:

“…media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

“A new e-mail message…may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.”

“Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives-or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts-as the Internet does today.”

And, an excerpt that provides an argument for the other side:

“In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.”

One commenter had an interesting perspective in favor of the information abundance we are experiencing:

“…it may not be that the internet is making us stupid but making us more demanding. Before the internet we were given a limited number of topics that we could review from a newspaper, television, magazine etc. Since they were limited in scope they needed a greater amount of depth and description. However now that we can delve a wider range of topics there is no need for such depth. In fact if a person was to spend as much time on any given topic today as was 50 years ago or more it would be hard to stay up to date on the numerous happenings that are going on. No longer are people simply expected to know what is going on in their home town on a day to day basis, but all the important events of the modern world….So it is really a question of balance and of need. Is it truly necessary for us to wrap our minds around each topic that we stumble upon on the net, or is it more important to simply grasp the main points of each topic? In today’s world it is no longer necessary to be intimately familiar with each topic, I can say that I have often found it better to skim information so that I am aware of it’s existence, then when I find myself in need of it I can pull it up more quickly.”

The debate is an interesting one that has spawned books, articles and comments galore. The access to information is empowering. The knowledge we gain is the power. The question then becomes, are we turning that information into knowledge? Perhaps we are in the midst of an evolutional shift: those that can learn to navigate the information streams and turn them into applicable knowledge are the ones that survive.

The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains is a book by Nicolas Carr that provides a history of how our brains process and absorb information delivered in evolving channels from oral storytelling, to the written word, from broadcast media to now through the web.  The impetus for the book was a 2008 article in The Atlantic titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” So, the premise of the book is the possibility that our continued digital media consumption in bits and bites could be diminishing our capacity to understand and process complex issues the require in-depth information analysis.  The conclusion, however, is not that our intelligence is waning, but instead that our faculties are changing, even evolving.

The Brain Changes as It Needs to Change

Through the first few chapters of the book, we learn that our brains are amazingly adept at adapting to these changes.  The brain actually re-wires itself to deal with the new experiences: “Evolution has given us a brain that can literally change its mind–over and over again.”  Experts quoted in the book support this fact:

“Our neurons are always breaking old connections and forming new ones, and brand-new nerve cells are always being created.  ’The brain,’ observes Olds, ‘has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.’”

“‘If we stop exercising our mental skills,’ writes Doidge, ‘we do not just forget them: the brain map space for those skills is turned over to the skills we practice instead.’”

Are We More or Less Creative as a Result?

Our brains become more accustomed to cursory scanning of data for relevant bits of information; in turn, it becomes more difficult for the brain to focus on long-form, single-source reading.  This is not a bad thing, as we are able to gather the same amount of information, but now diversify the sources from which that information comes.  However, a question was posed about the stifling of creativity as a result of reduced focused on reading as a meditative act.  Many of those quoted in the book felt the opposite was true:

“Friedman told me…that he’s ‘never been more creative’ than he has been recently, and he attributes that ‘to my blog and the ability to review/scan “tons” of information on the web.’”

“Karp has come to believe that reading lots of short, linked snippets online is a more efficient way to expand his mind than reading ’250-page books’…”

“Muses Davis, ‘The Internet may have made me a less patient reader, but I think that in many ways, it has made me smarter.  More connections to documents, artifacts, and people means more external influences on my thinking and thus on my writing.’”

Conclusion

History has shown that our brains adapt to the way information is processed: we did it when converting from oral storytelling to the written word and we are doing it as we convert from the written word to the digital word.

Recommendation

Read The Shallows.  It is a quick, interesting and relevant read right now.

As reported by the Guardian, online activity dipped during the inauguration.  Google searches, Flickr uploads and Last.fm listening all paused while listening to President Obama’s swearing in ceremony.  Google reported that:

“…the overall query volume of Google searches dropped in the U.S. from the time President Obama took the oath of office until the end of his inaugural speech, demonstrating that all eyes were on today’s festivities.”

However, the number of people trying to watch the ceremony live from their computers was incredibly high and caused some streaming difficulties for viewers.  According to a New York Times article:

“CNN said it provided more than 21.3 million video streams over a nine-hour span up to midafternoon. That blew past the 5.3 million streams provided during all of Election Day. At its peak, CNN.com fed 1.3 million live streams simultaneously, according to Jennifer Martin, a spokeswoman for the site.”

As Google points out, there has been a significant shift in internet use since the last presidential inauguration:

“During the last nine years, the growth of the Internet has changed the way the world seeks information. From President Bush’s first inaugural address in 2001 to his second in 2005, the number of inauguration-related searches increased by more than a factor of ten. From 2005 to today’s address, the number grew even more.”

I actually saw a commercial this morning for NetZero that suggested households start saving money by going back to dial-up internet service.  Seriously?  Should we be considering a move backwards?  I am scared about what the future holds in this scary economy, but I can’t imagine taking a step backwards to accomodate.  In fact, I think most people would feel the same way: there was recently a study released that people would rather give up sex than their internet connection.

As I am reading my latest issue of Wired, I learned the name of condition that I was already familiar with:

Homophily – the human tendency to seek out information that supports preexisting assumptions.

And, according to Wired, the internet “magnifies this echo-chamber effect.”  So, whether your beliefs are right or wrong, you can find a web resource that supports your beliefs and validates whatever argument you are having.

Makes sense.  This “condition” aligns with “niching” trend that is facilitated by the internet.  With a sense of individualism, people are making choices based on their own needs rather than following the masses around them.  To quote the book Microtrends,

“No matter how offbeat their choices, they can now find 100,000 people or more who share their taste for deep fried yak on a stick.

…the Internet has made it so easy to link people together.  In the past, it was almost impossible to market to small groups who were spread around the county. Now it’s a virtual piece of cake to find 1 million people who want to try your grapefruit diet, or who can’t get their kids to sleep at night.

With the rise in freedom of choice has come a rise in individuality.  And with the rise of individuality has come a rise in the power of choice.  The more choices people have, the more they segregate themselves into smaller and smaller niches in society.”

As marketers, this trend presents both a challenge and an opportunity.  The challenge is reaching broad audiences with our messages.  But the opportunity is that our dollars can be more efficiently spent targeting just those consumers likely to connect with our messages.

A continued theme in my readings and postings (here and here):

“The amount of video consumed on TV has dropped 5% among consumers who actively stream and download content…Meanwhile, movie theater consumption fell 2% while personal computer viewing grew 8%. One-in-five hours watching video is now done online.”

See Brandweek article for more detail.

Supposedly, once you start surfing, you can’t stop.  We are all information junkies and just can’t seem to get enough of it.  Reported in the Wall Street Journal:

“What is it about a Web site that might make it literally irresistible? Clues are offered by research conducted by Irving Biederman, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California, who is interested in the evolutionary and biological basis of the human need for information.

“Dr. Biederman first showed a collection of photographs to volunteer test subjects, and found they said they preferred certain kinds of pictures (monkeys in a tree or a group of houses along a river) over others (an empty parking lot or a pile of old paint cans).

“The preferred pictures had certain common features, including a good vantage on a landscape and an element of mystery. In one way or another, said Dr. Biederman, they all presented new information that somehow needed to be interpreted.

“When he hooked up volunteers to a brain-scanning machine, the preferred pictures were shown to generate much more brain activity than the unpreferred shots. While researchers don’t yet know what exactly these brain scans signify, a likely possibility involves increased production of the brain’s pleasure-enhancing neurotransmitters called opioids.

“In other words, coming across what Dr. Biederman calls new and richly interpretable information triggers a chemical reaction that makes us feel good, which in turn causes us to seek out even more of it. The reverse is true as well: We want to avoid not getting those hits because, for one, we are so averse to boredom.

“It is something we seem hard-wired to do, says Dr. Biederman. When you find new information, you get an opioid hit, and we are junkies for those. You might call us ‘infovores.’

“For most of human history, there was little chance of overdosing on information, because any one day in the Olduvai Gorge was a lot like any other. Today, though, we can find in the course of a few hours online more information than our ancient ancestors could in their whole lives.

“…technology is playing a trick on us. We are programmed for scarcity and can’t dial back when something is abundant.”

“No matter which services you choose, the most important point is simply to use video.  Too many companies don’t have clips showing their products, their philosophies, or simple news announcements by their CEOs.  Business is a conversation, and video is increasingly how that conversation takes place.” — summary of an article in this month’s Fast Company that talks all about the various ways video can be used by businesses.

Courtesy of Advertising Age this week, we learn that 2007 was the year that women tipped the scale to compose more than 50% of online users. What are they doing online?

• Shopping: travel, clothing, health & beauty products, financial products, and food. Women 45 to 54 were much more likely than men to make impulse purchases online when given limited-time offers or extra free items.
• Gaming: women are more likely to pay for play.
• Viewing video: news, movies previews, and music videos.
• Parenting: more than 43 million moms go online daily and spend an average of 85 minutes there.
• Socializing: women 25-34, with a college degree are more often to search for local dining and entertainment information, use instant messaging, visit social-networking sites, read blogs, and download music.
• Dating: when dating online, they lie about weight more often than any other attribute.
• Staying healthy: almost 84% of all women sought healthcare information online.

Using the Internet as a tool, more and more consumers are engaging in culture consumption, broadening their knowledge horizons and then using that experience and knowledge to contribute their own creative expressions and deposit those right back into our culture for further consumer consumption. According to a recent article in Ad Age:

“For years, marketers viewed the cultural consumer as an elite market segment, estimated to represent 2% of the overall population. As we witness a maturing knowledge economy, it’s become evident that we must enlarge our view of who’s consuming cultural experiences and how often. To benefit from the coming era, smart CMOs need to see that American consumers aspire to be viewed as thinking, expressive human beings…Consider these facts:

• The typical adult attends an average of 1.9 cultural events per month.
• 68% of the American public is interested in independent films.
• Gen Y-ers (those ages 18 to 29) attend an average of 2.3 cultural events per month.
• More Americans visit museums, historical sites, zoos and aquariums than attend all professional sports events combined, including auto racing.
• In 2006, 65% of households ranked “avid book reading” as their No. 1 at home leisure activity, according to the Standard Rate and Data Service.”

(Then again, according to a recent article in The New Yorker titled The Twilight of Books, you might not believe consumers are more culturally inclined and reading literature “…if you consulted the Census Bureau and the National Endowment for the Arts, who, since 1982, have asked thousands of Americans questions about reading that are not only detailed but consistent. The results, first reported by the N.E.A. in 2004, are dispiriting. In 1982, 56.9 per cent of Americans had read a work of creative literature in the previous twelve months. The proportion fell to fifty-four per cent in 1992, and to 46.7 per cent in 2002. Last month, the N.E.A. released a follow-up report, To Read or Not to Read, which showed correlations between the decline of reading and social phenomena as diverse as income disparity, exercise, and voting. In his introduction, the N.E.A. chairman, Dana Gioia, wrote, ‘Poor reading skills correlate heavily with lack of employment, lower wages, and fewer opportunities for advancement.’”)

If your target is an avid Internet user, they are more likely than not consuming cultural experiences frequently. And, as that Ad Age article notes, “Knowledge is power. Ideas are the killer app. Learning is the new status skill. This is an enlightened age, and culture consumers revere brands that teach them new things without pontificating.” What can brands do to feed that consumer hunger for cultural and knowledge?