Going Nowhere on the Information Superhighway

More than 50% of people die within 30 miles of where they were born. Even though America has a well-maintained highway system that spans the continent, most people don’t randomly pack up from their home town and go on a road trip to the opposite side of the country. And so it is with the virtual world. Before the Internet, information was highly segregated geographically. The farther you were from a source of information, the longer it took to reach you, and the more you had to go out of your way to consume it. This was the result of both the technology and the media networks that existed.

The Internet was supposed to revolutionize the way information moved. The so-called information super-highway would advance digital transit in the same way the Interstate Highway System did in the 1950’s. But just like the real highway system, the Internet hasn’t caused a mass exodus of ordinary bitizens. In this analogy, the reason is painfully obvious. It takes a huge amount of effort to leave your Internet communities and travel to another place where the dialect or even language is different. And to what gain?

These barriers to information cross-pollination result in an Internet that experiences de facto segregation along cultural boundaries. This division is no less real than the geographic segregation experienced by human populations in the real world. A TED talk by Ethan Zuckerman explores the vast sections of Twitter you may not even be aware existed; huge parts of Twitter are occupied by Brazilians and by African Americans, but if you are a caucasian American, you’ve probably never interacted with that side of Twitter. Even in the information age, we still consume the media closest to us. Yet this is even more dangerous, because the ease of information transfer lulls us into thinking that we are getting a cosmopolitan viewpoint, when in fact we are stuck in the middle of an echo chamber.

This is why it is so hard for people to branch out and become informed about subjects they don’t believe they are interested in. Be it international politics, scientific advances, or social justice debates, people often sit back and consume their news from whatever source is most familiar and convenient. The result is that I am woefully uninformed about the geopolitical situation in Africa, and the general public is woefully uninformed about anything related to space exploration. Then again, you don’t see me going out and reading up on African conflicts, so I don’t blame anyone for having a spotty knowledge base.