I think social media has brought us to a point in the development of communication where it could now be considered communication pollution. I model this like light:
In short, communication is so convenient there is no incentive to make it good. Since there is no incentive to make it good, the bad (by which I mean low-quality) radically outnumbers the good, and eats up the available attention-bandwidth.
Now light is so cheap it is essentially free, and so pervasive it causes harm.
At the same time most people underconsume light. Both in the amount of lumen they have available and in the ability to set light color differently at different time of the day.
This appears to be the strategy the organizations dedicated to darkening are pursuing.
Popular example: many streetlights throw light directly into the sky or sideways. They try to advocate for choosing the more expensive streetlights that effectively direct the light to the walking areas people actually use. The net result is usually a better-illuminated sidewalk.
I’ve seen research and demo-houses that employ the different light over the course of the day approach, but I have not seen anything about trying to get developers to offer it. In this way it falls into the same gap as any given environmental improvement in home/apartment building; people would probably by it if it were available, but have don’t have the option to select it because it isn’t; there’s no real way to express demand to developers short of people choosing to do independent design/builds.
I feel like this should also be handled by a contractor, but there’s not much in the way of ‘lighting contractors’ to appeal to; it seems like an electrician would have to shift their focus, or an interior decorator would have to expand into more contractor-y work.
I’ve seen research and demo-houses that employ the different light over the course of the day approach, but I have not seen anything about trying to get developers to offer it.
The technology is commerically sold with Philips Hue (and a few lesser known brands). It’s just a matter of putting different lightbulbs into the fixtures for light bulbs and setting up when you want what light.
My room is red at the end of the day and my screen is redish via f-lux.
Yeah. Digital communication removes costs such as paying for paper etc. But after all these costs are gone, two remain:
the time and work it cost you to produce the information;
the time and work it costs other people to select the information they want.
Here the relation is a bit adversarial: the delivery of the right information to the right reader is a cost that the writer and the readers most split somehow.
The writer may pay the cost by thinking twice whether something should be written at all, by doing some research and writing it well, perhaps by tagging it somehow so the readers can easily (preferably automatically) decide whether they are interested. Or the writer may simply throw around many scraps of content, of random topic, length, and quality, and let the readers sort it out.
This is partially about the writers (choosing to write about something, doing your homework first) and partially about the publishing systems (do they support tagging and filtering by tags, preferentially following your favorite writers, is there a possibility to mark something as “important” and a punishment for abusing this flag). Maybe the systems are frustrating because designing a non-frustrating system is extremely difficult. Or maybe the systems are frustrating because anything more complicated than “throw around scraps of content” would be too complicated to use for most users.
And the advertising! How could I expect companies to give me only the content I am interested in and filter out everything annoying, if “giving me the annoying things” is precisely their business model? So not only are good systems difficult to design and unlikely to become popular, there is even smaller incentive to create them.
How could I expect companies to give me only the content I am interested in and filter out everything annoying, if “giving me the annoying things” is precisely their business model? So not only are good systems difficult to design and unlikely to become popular, there is even smaller incentive to create them.
I don’t think that either Google or facebook as well described as “giving you the annoying things”. Both companies invest into giving people ads that they might engage with.
This happens both because they want to keep their users and don’t push them away and because the people who appreciate a given ad are most likely to engage with it.
If I search for a new microwave on Google and then get a bunch of new microwave ads everywhere I browse I’m likely getting those at the time of my life where I’m least bothered by them given that I actually want to buy a microwave.
If I search for a new microwave on Google and then get a bunch of new microwave ads everywhere I browse I’m likely getting those at the time of my life where I’m least bothered by them given that I actually want to buy a microwave.
When I buy a microwave, I typically open the websites of the few shops I trust, search for the products, compare their parameters, and read the reviews. I don’t really understand what extra value I get from Google showing me more microwave ads when I am trying to listen to some music on YouTube afterwards. My priors for Google showing me a better microwave are quite low. (But this is all hypothetical, because Google will show me the ad for Grammarly regardless.)
This happens both because they want to keep their users and don’t push them away and because the people who appreciate a given ad are most likely to engage with it.
My knowledge may be obsolete, but the last time I checked, there were essentially two models: “pay per view” and “pay per click”. Given that I am the kind of user who almost never clicks on ads, it makes more sense to show me the “per per view” ones, right?
But then, the income from ads shown to me is proportional to the number of ads shown to me. So the optimal amount of ads to show me is… smaller than the amount that would make me stop using the website… but not much smaller. Did I get my math wrong somewhere?
Communication Pollution
I think social media has brought us to a point in the development of communication where it could now be considered communication pollution. I model this like light:
Nordhaus traced the falling price of light over time in real terms.
Now light is so cheap it is essentially free, and so pervasive it causes harm. This is called light pollution.
There are organizations dedicated to restoring darkness hoping to reverse these harms.
The National Institutes of Health have sponsored research into the impact on humans.
In short, communication is so convenient there is no incentive to make it good. Since there is no incentive to make it good, the bad (by which I mean low-quality) radically outnumbers the good, and eats up the available attention-bandwidth.
At the same time most people underconsume light. Both in the amount of lumen they have available and in the ability to set light color differently at different time of the day.
This appears to be the strategy the organizations dedicated to darkening are pursuing.
Popular example: many streetlights throw light directly into the sky or sideways. They try to advocate for choosing the more expensive streetlights that effectively direct the light to the walking areas people actually use. The net result is usually a better-illuminated sidewalk.
I’ve seen research and demo-houses that employ the different light over the course of the day approach, but I have not seen anything about trying to get developers to offer it. In this way it falls into the same gap as any given environmental improvement in home/apartment building; people would probably by it if it were available, but have don’t have the option to select it because it isn’t; there’s no real way to express demand to developers short of people choosing to do independent design/builds.
I feel like this should also be handled by a contractor, but there’s not much in the way of ‘lighting contractors’ to appeal to; it seems like an electrician would have to shift their focus, or an interior decorator would have to expand into more contractor-y work.
The technology is commerically sold with Philips Hue (and a few lesser known brands). It’s just a matter of putting different lightbulbs into the fixtures for light bulbs and setting up when you want what light.
My room is red at the end of the day and my screen is redish via f-lux.
Yeah. Digital communication removes costs such as paying for paper etc. But after all these costs are gone, two remain:
the time and work it cost you to produce the information;
the time and work it costs other people to select the information they want.
Here the relation is a bit adversarial: the delivery of the right information to the right reader is a cost that the writer and the readers most split somehow.
The writer may pay the cost by thinking twice whether something should be written at all, by doing some research and writing it well, perhaps by tagging it somehow so the readers can easily (preferably automatically) decide whether they are interested. Or the writer may simply throw around many scraps of content, of random topic, length, and quality, and let the readers sort it out.
This is partially about the writers (choosing to write about something, doing your homework first) and partially about the publishing systems (do they support tagging and filtering by tags, preferentially following your favorite writers, is there a possibility to mark something as “important” and a punishment for abusing this flag). Maybe the systems are frustrating because designing a non-frustrating system is extremely difficult. Or maybe the systems are frustrating because anything more complicated than “throw around scraps of content” would be too complicated to use for most users.
And the advertising! How could I expect companies to give me only the content I am interested in and filter out everything annoying, if “giving me the annoying things” is precisely their business model? So not only are good systems difficult to design and unlikely to become popular, there is even smaller incentive to create them.
I don’t think that either Google or facebook as well described as “giving you the annoying things”. Both companies invest into giving people ads that they might engage with.
This happens both because they want to keep their users and don’t push them away and because the people who appreciate a given ad are most likely to engage with it.
If I search for a new microwave on Google and then get a bunch of new microwave ads everywhere I browse I’m likely getting those at the time of my life where I’m least bothered by them given that I actually want to buy a microwave.
When I buy a microwave, I typically open the websites of the few shops I trust, search for the products, compare their parameters, and read the reviews. I don’t really understand what extra value I get from Google showing me more microwave ads when I am trying to listen to some music on YouTube afterwards. My priors for Google showing me a better microwave are quite low. (But this is all hypothetical, because Google will show me the ad for Grammarly regardless.)
My knowledge may be obsolete, but the last time I checked, there were essentially two models: “pay per view” and “pay per click”. Given that I am the kind of user who almost never clicks on ads, it makes more sense to show me the “per per view” ones, right?
But then, the income from ads shown to me is proportional to the number of ads shown to me. So the optimal amount of ads to show me is… smaller than the amount that would make me stop using the website… but not much smaller. Did I get my math wrong somewhere?