Breaking through the infloglut: the vicious cycle between information overload and anger

COVID, global warming, conspiracy theorists, natural disasters, financial collapses – and a sham social media ban. It’s no wonder young Australians are glum, writes Professor Axel Bruns…

Why are we so angry? The easy, lazy, and entirely wrong explanation is that our technologies are to blame: the Internet, smartphones, social media, artificial intelligence, and so on. That’s the argument behind Australia’s doomed social media ban for young people, which is inspired by the deceptive claims and cherry-picked statistics peddled by pop-psychology influencers like Jonathan Haidt in his roundly debunked book The Anxious Generation, and driven by a moral panic that was cynically manufactured by the Murdoch media.

So why are we so anxious, and angry? Take the average 20-year-old in Australia: born into the aftermath of the 2008 Great Financial Crisis, they have seen companies reap record profits while for ordinary Australians the prospect of affordable housing has slipped ever further from their grasp.

They grew up in the shadows of the unresolved conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and today encounter a daily dose of death and destruction in the reporting from Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, and other conflict hotspots. They spent their most formative teenage years in COVID lockdowns and Zoom schooling, while conspiracy theorists tried to convince their parents that the pandemic was a hoax perpetuated by some global cabal. They’ve experienced more than a decade of the hottest years in human memory during their lifetime, most likely lived through one or more natural disasters in their area, and yet have seen utter political inaction on the climate crisis. And those of us who are older have simply experienced all that for longer.

So how could they, and we, not be anxious and angry – regardless of whether we use smartphones and social media, or not? As David Weinberger wrote as early as 2004, in his fabulous take-down of the ‘echo chamber’ fallacy, “the problem with an extraterrestrial-conspiracy mailing list isn’t that it’s an echo chamber”, facilitated by the digital platforms of the day: rather, the problem is “that it thinks there’s a conspiracy by extraterrestrials”.

The same goes for climate crisis denialists, anti-vaccination activists, sovereign citizens, far-right extremists, and other anti-social, anti-societal, and anti-democratic groups: it’s their angry, extreme, exclusionary, and uncompromising views that are the problem, rather than the technologies they use to express and spread them; if they didn’t have X as a platform that actively endorses their views, they’d find another.

Wherever that anxiety and anger comes from, whether ‘the Internet’ (whatever that means these days) or the other threatening scenarios: together they have highlighted what a complex world we live in.

Let’s take one example: the observation that pandemics like COVID-19 simply happen from time to time and that there’s little more we can do than simply to prepare for the next one, is entirely correct, of course, but also deeply unsatisfying. It’s a great deal more convenient to comfort ourselves with fairytales of bioweapon factories, lab leaks, depopulation agendas, or interference by the Illuminati, aliens, or the Antichrist: they provide a concrete target for our anxiety, anger, and action.

Where our modern communication technologies do come in is in the fact that they’ve made all that information – ‘real’ as much as ‘fake’ – so much easier to access and circulate, globally and instantly.

This substantially contributes to an information overload: we can readily access WHO reports about the pandemic and its causes, the more or less careful and insightful coverage of those reports by the world’s media, but also the ‘explainer’ writings and videos of conspiracy theorists and influencers that cherry-pick and misrepresent those facts in order to perpetuate their ‘alternative’ worldviews.

We’re overloaded by this infoglut: we, all of us, have neither the time nor the subject matter expertise to be able to reliably distinguish verified facts from made-up stories, or well-supported conclusions from far-fetched conjecture.

Ironically,  the problem we’re facing – the reason we’re so angry – is the very opposite of the claims made by those still peddling the ‘echo chamber’ and ‘filter bubble’ fallacies that see us all in self-insulating bubbles: rather, the hyperconnectivity enabled by our current media environments produces an information overload which we are ill-equipped to process or reduce. We may not consciously articulate this all the time, but deep down we recognise this, and that makes us anxious, and even angry; for many, the coping mechanism is to reach for easy explanations and ready-made scapegoats (elites, migrants, secret societies, other countries – or generally, others who simply are not like us).

But that story isn’t new; in fact, it is perhaps as old as humanity itself, even if it now plays out across a different media landscape.

It can’t be solved by banning smartphones, or social media, or AI; indeed, conspiracy theories and other disinformation usually only reach a broader audience when they’re also amplified by politicians, celebrities, and mainstream media.

Uncertainty produces rumours, which generate anxiety, which results in the scapegoating and exclusion of others; the commercial imperatives of mainstream media as well as social media encourage this further, as both seek sustained audience engagement.

Any attempts to deal with these destructive dynamics must focus first and foremost on the underlying causes of our anxiety and anger, of course; to return to where we started, as governments in Australia and elsewhere are beginning to find out, you don’t make young people less anxious by preventing them from communicating about their anxieties, but by paying serious attention to their actual concerns.

At the same time, we must confront the challenges of hyperconnectivity and information overload more directly, and central to this is to improve literacy in all its forms. This includes, of course, news and digital media literacy, to enable citizens better to distinguish quality, reliable information and sources from those that seek to mislead and enrage them; societal and civic literacy, to improve public understanding of the mechanisms of government and governance in Australia and elsewhere.

We must also ensure that citizens understand their individual rights and (just as importantly) obligations towards others within society, and enhance scientific literacy (across both social and natural sciences) to prevent them from falling prey to scientistic cherry-picking, whether on climate change or the effects of social media use. Together those initiatives aim to save Australia from a trajectory that promotes deeply polarised, winner-takes-all politics as we see it played out in US politics. Instead, they redirect citizens towards an understanding of political debate that is oriented towards workable compromise between legitimate diverging opinions, even if consensus remains unattainable.

To achieve that will not be a quick fix. It will be a generational project. However, Australia can learn from other countries here: from Finland’s successful media literacy strategy, and Germany’s Federal Agency for Civic Education. Indeed, education at all levels, from primary to tertiary and beyond to lifelong learning, is central to this, and a substantial boost in investment will be required even just to avoid a further decline in media literacy levels across the population in the short term. All the more important that we confront this urgently, then: if we don’t, we’ll only grow more anxious and ever more angry.