The Future of our Information Environment

Meeting people where they’re at in this age of content overload

Note: You can now listen to a podcast I recorded with the researchers here.

Occasionally, I encounter something I can’t get out of my head. I’ll bring it up multiple times a day in conversation. Then, I’ll start writing notes about it in a Google doc to process how it changes my thinking.

Earlier this year, it was Neil Howe’s book The Fourth Turning is Here about historical cycles and how the next six to ten years will change our country and world dramatically (still very relevant and worth reading if you haven’t). 

Meta’s decision to pull back on politics and news in its feeds is an ongoing topic. I stewed about it in July 2023 when Threads launched. I’ve written and stewed about it whenever Mark is asked about it, or a reporter asks me to comment. I don’t like it when people say it’s a good thing and social media and politics shouldn’t mix. It drove me a bit nuts when my own research showed that people didn’t want politics in their feeds. To add more salt to the wound accounts by politicians is at the very bottom of the types of accounts people on TikTok follow according to Pew.

My latest obsession is research by Jigsaw and Gemic about how GenZers engage with the information environment - especially with AI. Now, admittedly, this study is a small sample size. They only talked to 52 people aged 18-24 in Bangalore, India, and New York City. However, my gut is that what they found is a canary in the coal mine about how the growing and fragmented information environment has changed how we engage with it, and that means we need to meet people where they are if we want to have an impact.

Let’s start with two key points that they found:

1. People are overloaded with information, and different information modes have emerged as a coping mechanism. Many participants felt pressured to pay attention to their social media feeds but found all the information emotionally exhausting. For example, participants perceived news about war and politics as carrying social consequences, which compelled them to act upon learned information. Meanwhile, content that is fun, interesting, and easy to engage with is more emotionally soothing. They can quickly switch between these modes while consuming content, and mental health and an emotional equilibrium are prioritized when deciding what to consume.
   
   This is a chart from the Jigsaw/Gemic presentation of how the participants perceived the value of various types of content.

   

   
   This shows the seven information modes that emerged among the participants. Most of the time is spent in the obligation-free and light-content quadrant.

   

2. Young people spend most of their time online not concerned with truth because they only seek to pass the time. Their concepts of who and what to trust are less based on institutions and more on their own research and social circles. Information no longer needs to be based on institutional approval, academic pedigree, and scientific rationality to be considered trustworthy. Now, many more types of expertise are accepted, and trustworthiness is often based on perceived relatability. Social motivations also drive information processing more than truth assessments. In a post-truth era, it is necessary to approach information literacy as a “social and connective act performed in relation to collective norms and group identities.”

   1. Traditional information literacy models often describe online information journeys as linear: people seek or encounter information, make conscious decisions about what information to trust, and act accordingly. [The researchers], however, observed a much more dynamic and reactive series of behaviors. Our participants constantly shifted between different information modes, testing intuitively and adjusting their behaviors based on their feelings.

   2. Participants also articulated the need to rely on themselves because of the perception that previous generations and institutions have failed them.

I can hear some of you now lamenting the youth and how horrible it is that we’re in this spot. Some people will mention that we need more civic education in school or that maybe putting more labels on everything will fix the problem.

But we need to wake up and accept this reality and the new one that we are moving towards. It’s no wonder that young people don’t trust institutions when polls show that misinformation from politicians is the number one worry of folks, and lack of trust in the news media isn’t far behind. And those aren’t just polls of young people; that's for Americans overall. I encourage you to read this Atlantic piece about how fact-checking is not a political strategy.

And, I need to accept that people don’t want politics and news in their feeds… or do I?

In reading the full study, the authors stress the need to adapt not only fact-check interventions but also how we deliver information to people so that we meet them where they are. They offer some handy charts with observations of what the participants wanted. To keep up with the times, they wanted a summary of important issues, and to prep for debate, they wanted quick takes and links to other sources as a starting point for doing their own research.

This didn’t say they didn’t want this information at all. In fact, my gut is that the closer we get to the election, the more societal pressure people will feel to have an opinion on the candidates and issues. They want to see/engage with this content but on their terms. They don’t want it popping in when they’re trying to decompress.

This is where I get excited about AI's promise. Some of you might remember me excitedly talking about how Meta was using AI to summarize comments in local groups this summer. I’ve long hypothesized that very soon, our newsfeeds won’t look like they do now. We’ll start having more summaries of the content with options to click deeper on the things we want to click deeper on.

If consumers are burnt out by seeing news and politics all the time, then we can experiment with different ways of helping to summarize this information more quickly for them. We can find new ways to meet them at the sources of information they trust—see Harris doing the Call Me Daddy podcast to reach GenZ and 60 Minutes to reach the Boomers. The Pew study I mentioned above also observed that “accounts that discuss news and politics tend to mix these topics with humor, entertainment and other ‘light’ content.”

We’re living in a new world, one that requires us to adapt to the one we have. This doesn’t mean we can’t have the world we wish we had, but it means moving forward and experimenting with how we continually adapt rather than just longing for the past.

Monday night, I went to sleep ruminating about how I would write this newsletter - I had even dreamt about it. When I woke up yesterday morning, I did the daily Calm meditation, and the message fit the point I’m trying to make here. In it, they talk about how unpredictable life is and there’s no way of knowing what is around the corner - despite how hard we try to control things. They recommend being like a lighthouse to see the bigger picture to find stability. Lighthouses stand strong in all sorts of good and bad conditions. They take a 360 view of the world around them, giving us stability and perspective.

We’ll be hearing much over the coming months about the information environment surrounding this election. It will be hard for us to determine what is true or not. We will get through it. As we do, and as we process all that is happening and changing, it will do us good to think about how our consumption of information has changed and how we need to adapt - whether on an individual level in how we manage our own intake or on a collective level for those of us who work in tech and/or contribute to the information overload.

The longer we fight this new world, the harder it will be for us to shape it. 

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