1716: Desperately Seeking Information

Something a friend of mine said in an online chat earlier made me think about the way we, humanity, use the Internet on a daily basis — and particularly the role that social media plays in many of our lives.

He said that as human beings, we crave information. It doesn’t matter what that information is, we’re just hungry for it; forever consuming, devouring any input we can get our brains wrapped around, however mundane, stupid or fury-inducing.

After he said this, I took stock of my online existence since leaving Facebook and Twitter behind. I still haven’t looked at the former at all; I’ve peeped at the latter once or twice to see if I had any mentions or direct messages — I didn’t (apart from a share of this post by a dentist who clearly hadn’t read it at all), which, I won’t lie, smarted a bit, but I’ll live.

What I have done, however, is almost immediately replace them with other things. I was always intending to make more active use of the Squadron of Shame forums, for example, but they have become my primary go-to hangout online — which makes their occasional lack of activity a little frustrating. (Come join up and talk in a chin-strokey fashion about games!) But that’s not all I’m doing: instead of relying on what Twitter is talking about for a picture of the day’s news — a practice which tends to give you an inherently biased picture of what is going on, due to the political tendencies of some of Twitter’s most vocal users — I’m specifically seeking out sites like the BBC and the Guardian to read about stories at my own pace. (I still skip over anything that just offers me a video and no text, though; fuck video.)

I am not, however, reading a great deal about video games. This is less about losing interest in them — which my marathon Xillia 2 session this evening will emphatically attest that I am not — and more about feeling there aren’t really any sites out there that speak to (or for) me. I’ve discussed this with a number of people with whom I share similar proclivities, and many of us tend to feel the same way: while the ad-based revenue model for these sites continues to be in place, we’re never going to see the sort of coverage that we’re interested in seeing. Those sites that do try different things — like Polygon with its now-defunct features section, or 1up with its community-driven nature — end up either closing down altogether, or at the very least shedding the things that made them unique and becoming yet another identikit site of daily triple-A and indie darling news churn.

But I digress. The point is, the information void I left when I cut social media out of my life was immediately filled by something else. It’s a compulsion; an uncontrollable urge. As a human being, my brain demands information; it needs input. More input.

I’m not entirely sure if that’s a healthy compulsion, since as I noted above, the 21st-century brain doesn’t appear to be all that selective about what it wants to absorb into itself. Perhaps if the brain craved nothing but new knowledge — information that would allow it to let its host function as a better human being — that might be absolutely fine.

But no. The 21st century brain is interested in menstrual menaces and megachile perihirta (commonly known as the Western leafcutting bee); in cats drinking from squirt bottles and… oh, you get the idea.

The human brain is a mysterious thing. Whatever you may feel about the information you stuff into it on a daily basis, though, I think we can probably all agree that the Internet has had a profound impact on how we perceive, seek out and consume information these days, hmm?