Why Good Information is Gold

I spent a week mostly offline and it reminded me why being online is necessary. And dangerous.

I love goooooold (good information). Source: Jingming Pan on Unsplash.

You’ll have to forgive my little indulgence in hackneyed sociology, but I can’t help myself. I’ve just finished a move, I’m easing back into work, and I’m treating this space more and more as a place to think in writing and to engage with readers as they respond. This blog/site/newsletter/whatever-you-call-it has become a bit of a community, and I find the comments and emails, and the exchanges they lead to, interesting and productive.

Speaking of productivity, a week of moving was a week of being offline. I was mostly disconnected from the news and social media, and it was glorious. But it was also edifying. At a distance removed, so much of the online beefs, trolling, “breaking” and “important” news seems..inconsequential. But, at the same time, I missed out on a lot of what’s been happening in the world.

Talking to people who don’t follow the bouncing ball of the news, you realise that for most folks, day-to-day, they’re mostly focused on, well, getting through the day. They’re making meals and packing lunches, tidying the house, getting the kids to school or sports or wherever it is kids go, running errands, and, of course, working. They may have a sense of the pressing news of the day, the broad strokes of the issues at hand, but they’re not expert or professional news consumers or social media (shit)posters.

Stats from the Reuters Institute at Oxford tell us a lot about how people get their news — or not. In 2023, 69 percent of Canadians got their news online (including social media). Roughly 95 percent of Canadians are online and in late-2023, people were spending about 6 hours a day connected to Al Gore’s World Wide Web through one device or another. Most of these people are on social media, and 31 percent say they use it to access the news.

But the extremely online are another category, among whom journalists and political hangers-on feature prominently, giving us a distorted sense of how people live and what they value. Every time I get some distance from the crucible, I’m reminded that while the internet, and social media in particular, are indeed real life (real people log on, have conversations, share information, learn, make friends, lose friends, fight, troll, etc.), they’re not universal, exclusive spaces in which people live their lives. Too much time online distracts from that fact, or risks inducing us to forget it entirely. But whether you’re online or offline, one phenomenon is the same: we can only take in so much information.

For both those online and those offline, we’re still operating in a world in which we pick up snippets of info; we learn on the fly, nab a fact or semi-fact casually, and then go out into the world to discuss it. We don’t have the time or, typically, the inclination to read and think deeply on everything that crosses our screen or pops up on a page. We don’t always check the source, cross-reference, interrogate, etc., etc. So. our conversations, beliefs, and knowledge are fragmented and woefully incomplete, and often simply incorrect. We’re out there, believing things and making decisions with a quarter tank of knowledge at best. The rest is vibes or inferences or bullshit.

None of this is ideal, but what do we expect? See above: people are busy and they’re trying to get through the day. Even when someone reads the news or gets into a conversation online or offline, they’re not likely to dedicate themselves to becoming deeply informed on whatever’s come up. They have neither the time nor the bandwidth to do so in a world in which there is simply so much stuff coming at them. Perhaps even more importantly, so many of us are inclined to want to reinforce our preconceived notions or beliefs and to belong to community of believers rather than get the “right” answer and risk alienating ourselves from our own identity or group.

The dynamic I’m describing is the reason why having high-quality information communicated kindly and in good-fatih is utterly essential both online and offline. In a world in which people can only consume so much info, will tend to believe things they hear first, may be resistant to changing their mind, and routinely rely on heuristics (mental shortcuts and guides) to reach decisions and develop beliefs, good information is gold — and bad information is poison. And the internet is full of that poison. And when we approach discussions and debates spoiling for a fight, we all end up worse off.

We won’t all agree on what “good” information is, and that’s okay. We have deep, substantive disagreements about values and commitments and what ought to be done. At the same time, facts, on their own, will only get us so far. While you might assume a fact is a fact is a fact, the truth is that (expert) sources of factual information can disagree, reaching conclusions based on any number of factors, including method, skill, error, different conceptual approaches or definitions, and so forth. So, even factual knowledge obtained in good faith isn’t always a universal given. But, again, even if it were, while facts are elementary and important bits of knowledge, they’re not enough on their own — they’re not enough for us to decide how we should live and how we should live together.

But we should be able to agree (though we won’t) that good information is offered in good faith, that it is carefully collected and considered, that it is presented fully and in context, that it is checked against reality to whatever extent is possible, and that it is provisional insofar as we’re prepared to swap it out for new information if necessary.

I think the great challenge of our time online is trying to raise the proportion of good information and lower the proportion of bad information while engaging with one another constructively so that it’s easier to find gold than poison. This applies offline, too. But given the scale and volume and speed of digital, networked info flows, and given that what happens online shapes the offline world, the internet is the bigger problem.

I’ll leave it there for now since I have boxes to unpack, but I’m curious to hear what readers think about this: where you get their information, which sources you trust and why, whether you fight with people online and why, and what you experiences are like when you manage to log off for a bit. I’ll be back next week on the politics beat — just as soon as I adjust to consuming way too much news again.