Was it the only way that this attention economy cannibalized the age of information?
On top of that, we got pop up ads, spam, and pages that are actively hostile to users intent.
The insult is far worse than you imagine.
I think eventually we need some kind of canonicalization in order to progress, in terms of knowledge/information organization, but I'm not sure if that's a doable in today's digital society.
All throughout history, the experts disagree with everything said before in a ten year cycle.
The the “Big Bang” for instance. It is junk science. It is fake news. The Big Bang stands for however it started and I have no idea, but wait, it must have gone something like this…
We’re always revising history, and disagreeing for decades over those revisions.
What would be a useful canonical fact? The weather? A sensor observation? A record of topical articles (all of them)?
It seems whatever you’re asking for needs every bit of everything, with an intelligent interface (curated, ranked, filtered, matched, and revision chronolized) for reviewing it.
What you need is a librarian cult, not less content.
Novelty and mass apatite are only eclipsed by the panicked reflex for survival.
Curation is the new art. Find outlets which themselves refine and distill, without disappointing.
Maybe it's just FOMO on information .
State is one thing, representing that state is another (we now hesitate to use the word “meta”).
Disposition toward that state is both a strategic imperative and the source of inferential bias.
What you seek are Authorities of Truth.
Like Wiki on blockchain consensus which both empirically records events in time series and mob debates their validity or relevance.
Human cognition is not as clean and clear regarding “facts” as you optimistically presume.
Information is the removal of uncertainty (or the resolve of potential to disparate state if you accuse me of anthropomorphism.)
If it does not “remove uncertainty” it is not information.
Information is not objective, it’s value lies in the mind of the evaluator.
The Truth is a perturbation of Objective Reality. The “truth” is the representation in mind. “Integrity” is the measure of consistency between these two.
And one more thing. The “democratic” mob is NOT a qualified curator of truths, only a barometer of widely disseminated integrity (which usually comes by undeceiving the self rather than agreeing with one and other.)
The exception to this is journalism, and maybe the problem is that information/knowledge sharing has been massively approach as if it were journalism.
Advertising was invented for classified ad buyers by newspapers. It has since adapted to each new medium that came along, radio, TV, signboards, etc and now all manner of internet properties.
With technical searches, carefully crafted search terms can locate useful information. However, I find that once I venture into more general realms, the majority of the results, no matter how detailed the search terms, are ads or content with masses of affiliate links, etc. That is, very low grade ore (information), effectively useless for knowledge building purposes.
If it wasn't for advertising revenues, sites like Google, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and many others wouldn't exist. Most people would probably not choose to pay to access those sites.
I got the iphone 13 pro, and the 120hz screen lets me read more stuff more quickly. Have I benefitted towards my "life goal"? Probably not, it may have been a detriment.
