Sensemaking depends upon sensing signals among the information we get and framing that against our experience. What happens when it’s all too much?
Information overload goes back to the 1960’s and a book by Bertram Goss on The Management of Organizations. It was popularized by Alvin Toffler in the 1970s in his widely read book Future Shock. This is all before cable TV, computers, the Internet, and AI. It came about the same time as Marshall McLuhan was theorizing on the role of media in shaping culture.
Yet, the felt sense of information overload continues to evolve.
When Your Profession and Hobbies Go Sour
I read, study, and research for a living. I teach and practice strategic design for a living, supporting graduate students and health professionals learn about, shape, and evaluate the systems around them. Information is at the core of what I offer, synthesize, and create. It’s not all, but it’s an important part. After all, when we are shaping health systems, we are affecting people’s lives and need to ground our efforts in something we can trust.
I’m also a certifiable nerd, with many interests of the cultural, artistic, and scientific persuasion. Thus, my hobby is as much information-driven as anything else.
What happens when there is an active campaign to poison your practice and your hobby? And what happens when that campaign is run by those who engage with the very tools and technologies that feed us the information that sustains us? (In other words, nearly all of us).
Those are questions that sit with me.
Strong Signal Strength
In complex systems, we are wise to pay attention to weak signals. These are the small, but detectable patterns that offer a glimmer of coherence among the turbulence and dynamism of what’s around us. These weak signals are often what give the best investors, entrepreneurs, and innovators their edge: they see things before others do. Weak signals are often indicators of where the system is going to, not where it is.
Strong signals are those that reflect the culture as it is.
In a time of great interconnection and speed of communication, culture changes quickly. Anyone over the age of 18 trying to keep on top of the shift in cultural language and trends knows how fast things become trends and then disappear. This is powered by communication technologies like short videos, social feeds, messaging apps, and the immediacy and mobility of the tools to access them.
I’m less bothered by being largely ignorant of 6-7, skibidi, or Labubus, but more so by what happens to those cultural tools that are more of my generation. Specifically, I’m referring to writing platforms.
Platform Path Dependence
Medium, which was once a space where some of the most insightful design writing was shared, now feels like a click-bait factory serving up pre-made, pre-formatted, articles that are neither original nor engaging. They are all looking the same to me. There remain a few writers I still follow (Sonja Bligneau is one, a must-read), but those I did follow (like Roger Martin) have since de-camped for Substack along with many others. (I’ve been publishing on that platform for three years).
Substack’s working great…for now. Like Medium, it’s tried to be an author-driven platform for enabling great content. It still is, for now. But as Cory Doctorow’s shown, enshittification for us all. Platforms like Substack are funded by so much Venture Capital money that eventually they need to see a return, and that means appealing to masses and cutting back on what it offers to users.
For Substack, this isn’t about the money that authors make (although that is most certainly going to be affected), but the quality of the work that’s published. That’s why I am there.
If I look at Medium, what I seen is this push toward a standardization of language, phrasing and styles. Some of this is undoubtedly due to the use of AI, which I have to believe more authors are using. But it’s also because the algorithms that draw content to the top of searches are set for mass. That means mass market, mass output, and mass culture. Things that are different, original, or just beyond the mass are pushed out.
We have a very strong path dependence that is reinforced through writing norms, algorithmic promotion, and what gets viewed as good work (e.g., views, likes, and shares versus engaged or inspired readers).
Quality and Quantity
I recently updated my RSS reader (yep, they still work!), and set it for a number of topics, including “design thinking”. I love using this as a way to scan through what’s being discussed and published on particular topics. When I started getting the results, I was horrified — although not surprised. Post after post — many of them from Medium — were coming in with the same style of writing, click-bait-y titles, and (largely) pointless commentary.
It’s not that what I was fed was wrong, it was just so vacuous. There was no “there, there”. After weeks of keeping the feed unaltered, I’ve found myself both fascinated and horrified by what I am seeing.
Writing has always been social. We write based on what we read, what we like, and who we admire. The hope is that, over time, we discover our voice. We start to write with a style and clarity that fits us. Sure, we’ll all write a little similar, but it will be our own.
What’s happening now is that the speed of information, the exposure to so much content that is algorithmically aligned to be similar, and the tools available to harmonize our writing to that of the market, not just our own patterns of understanding and thought. There’s much discussion about this — we are seeing this form of massification that we’ve never seen before.
Massification
AI is pure Silicon Valley: more, faster, efficiently, and as widely scaled as possible. None of these concepts fit with deep learning, richness of experience, or provocation of thought.
This drive for massified writing and homogeneous cultural references is starting to show up in my students submissions. Every semester, the writing gets more generic, less varied, and certainly less interesting. It makes great writing stand out even more. What I mourn for is that students often haven’t had the exposure to better writing, deep thinking, and the opportunity to practice and craft a perspective through text without assistance. Some probably don’t know how to write any better. And why should they? When you are constantly fed something that some algorithm thinks they will like based on what is both popular and what is common, the norms and standards of success become set. When you’re given a ready-made platform to share this kind of writing (or producing, because video is treated the same way), your behaviour is reinforced.
With algorithms, it’s self-reinforcing.
There’s a cultural push toward a certain kind of content that Marshall McLuhan, were he alive to see it, might have said “I told you so.”
The medium is the message literally and figuratively in some cases.
As soon as Instagram shifted from being a platform to share photo-based stories to short-videos, it lost what made it special. Once any platform shifts from delivering quality, reliable content from people you’ve opted in to follow to feeding up recommendations and paid ads, the value is gone. Medium is now about mass. Blogs — like this one — are anomalies. Thankfully, they’re still ‘weird’ in that there’s no dominant model out there that’s centralizing our writing, allowing us writers to continue saying what we want in a style we like.
But a cost is that search no longer respects this and AI is stealing the content. If you’re reading this, you’re a subscriber, had it forwarded to you or from another post, maybe used an RSS feed (which is why they can be useful), or stumbled on to it by luck.
Unlike just a few years ago, it would have been something much more likely to be sought and found.
Enshittification is massification and it comes with a cost.
What I’m left trying to contemplate is what we’ll pay, and what kind of ways we can reasonably design our way out. At least, for those who want something better. The strong signals are feeling very weak.