Filter Failure:
When a person first begins to use social media, the experience can be overwhelming. There are so many tools and virtual information exchange environments available, and each one offers affordances for connecting the person to other people and groups of people. It is difficult to keep track of where a particular unit of information came from, who it came from, and how to find the way back to the source. It is difficult to know which members of a group have seen which units of information and to know what they might be reacting to in a post. It is difficult to know where information that you broadcast is going and who is seeing it. Does it last forever? Will it linger around forever? Am I offending people? What did that person mean when they said that? What are they trying to imply?
Interactions with people can be difficult. Suddenly, instantly interacting with thousands of people that you hardly know can be frightening. But what is the cause of the anxiety, the cognitive overload, the dissonance and feeling of being overwhelmed? Are our brains geared to handle the proliferation and speed and sporadic mysteriousness of social media?
Maybe the problem is not with the processing capability of the brain, but rather the effectiveness of the barriers that we set up to filter the information that we interact with. We probably can’t use every available tool to access every available information source and see every posted item and link. We have to make choices. We have to decide which conduits we will use and create some kind of communal commons to temporarily consolidate the information streams for each particular social environment. When that event comes to an end, the commons dissolves, and each little conduit tendril is released to make new synaptic connections in other individuals and groups. Each thread was never really captured to begin with.
So, back to the original question: Are our brains geared for dealing with the maelstrom of social media? Yes. The cognitive overload that new users experience is not a result of a failure of our brains to accommodate new people and information. The number of people, conduits and units of information is infinite. Instead, it is a failure of our ability to set boundaries; a failure to control the parameters by which we determine which avenues we will allow in. It is a failure of our filters. A filter failure.
3 replies on “Filter Failure”
I like the term filter failure, it seems to have much more potential for usefulness and accuracy than “information overload.” Filter failure assigns responsibility to the individual user, if one is overwhelmed by a flood of information they probably need to find ways to use the filtering tools available more effectively. By assigning responsibility to the user we can move away from the passive victim of information overload to recognize the potential power of the user who has learned to make use of the tools available to control the flow of information to them.
I spent some time thinking about the whole filter failure business and like you, I’m inclined to believe that our brain can handle it. That said, there is something to be said for the personality of a person and their ability to handle large amounts of information. An example I like to use is how some people when given too many choices at a food court end up taking far longer to decide what to eat than some who can look at the spread and zoom in on what he likes. Part of it is a “what if” mentality – considering the opportunity cost of not eating/ reading/ doing one thing over another. The more decisive a person, the higher the ability to filter out information.
My step-father used to say that I was always going off “half-cocked”. Not true. I jest learn by doing and I want to experience the world. I get very impatient with hemming and hawing. The cost benefit analysis for many complicated situations usually comes down to just a few choices. It’s fear that keeps us from jumping in. Can’t decide between the chicken sandwich and the slice of pepperoni pizza? Get the pizza. The chicken sandwich will still be there tomorrow.