A quarter-century ago in digital years (2005, to be exact), technologist Clive Thompson argued that “information is no longer a scare resource – attention is,” in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. This isn’t a secret to anyone working in the digital space in 2010.
However, new research from Edelman suggests that the many tools and communities that make the web a rich place could actually be leading to a decrease in trust.
Edelman’s latest Trust Barometer suggests that we don’t trust people as much as we used to. According to the survey, 25% of people surveyed view their friends and peers as credible sources of information. This is quite a drop from 2008, when 45% of people said the same thing. The study also showed that
- 64% of those surveyed said they trust academics.
- 52% trust financial and industry experts.
- 44% trust people who represent NGOs.
- 39% felt the messages conveyed by consumer spokespeople were credible.
- 27% trust government.
- 26% trust CEOs as the public faces of their companies.
David Berkowitz, director-emerging media for 360i, told the Silicon Alley Insider that
“When you’re seeing so much noise, it’s very easy to dismiss a lot of it, and that’s a problem marketing messages have had for a while now. Facebook really exemplifies this with the live-feed and news-feed options. If you use the live feed and have a few hundred friends, some kind of peer recommendation, whether it’s explicit or not, appears every couple of minutes and sometimes they come in a matter of seconds. If you’re seeing all of that come in, it can be overwhelming.”
Perhaps Berkowitz is right. Perhaps we are facing cognitive overload.
Last summer, three researchers studied behavior on online dating sites. They found that while people say that want more choices in potential mates from online dating sites, they spend less time evaluating the right ones. Pai-Lu Wu (Cheng Shiu University) and Wen-Bin Chiou (National Sun Yat-Sen University in Taiwan) found that when faced with too many options, users become overloaded:
“More search options lead to less selective processing by reducing users’ cognitive resources, distracting them with irrelevant information, and reducing their ability to screen out inferior options.”
Screening all those dating choices for subtle things, like a certain sense of humor, leads to better matches.
Perhaps what we need are better filters. At least, this could be an argument drawn from Clay Shirky’s recent speech on Information Overload vs. Filter Failure at Web 2.0 Expo in New York. Shirky argued that this kind of overload isn’t new. Humans have faced these issues since the invention of the printing press.
“What we’re dealing with isn’t information overload. It’s filter failure. . . .This is a general system design problem for our era. . . . It isn’t about access to information. It’s about flows and access to flows. It’s about designing a system that accommodates good information and good conversation. We don’t have the obvious tools to pick up the current environment and help filter it. This isn’t a design problem. It’s a mental shift. It assumes that we are in information overload and that this problem will continue indefinitely. If you have the same problem for a long time, maybe it’s not a problem. Maybe it’s a fact. . . . Designing new filters doesn’t mean updating the old filters. They are broken. When you feel yourself getting too much information, ask yourself, ‘what filter just broke.’”
The Obama administration realized this early on. In an interview with the Washington Times last April, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said,
“There are so many outlets and so many places that are driving news that, in the end, nothing gets driven.”
This was the thinking behind the Obama administration’s tactical decision to flood every possible mediascape with the president late last year, from network news to Comedy Central to the Internet. And it was this same tactic that became the obsession of Beltway punditry last autumn, when every possible talking head fixated on the question of whether the president was — perhaps — overexposed in the media.
In the advocacy world, we can’t always run an Obama strategy. We lack the money to be on every possible media outlet at the same time and, for the most part, most of us lack the widespread appeal of a presidency.
We do have the ability to think more effectively. To evaluate our digital outreach programs and focus not just on the kinds of numbers that impress our clients but also on the quality of our relationships — quality, not quantity. Because, as Clay Shirky informed the audience of TED in 2009, in this environment, “what matters isn’t technical capitol. It’s social capitol.”
