#infoguilt

We feel the pain of being unable to respond and the guilt of living in comfort and safety while others suffer, and we make snap judgments and gut decisions about what information to let through our emotional filters, and what actions we can spare amidst the ever growing demands of work, family and social life in an always-connected present. But given the available alternatives, let’s continue to struggle through our infoguilt, keep talking it out, and not cede these moral, ethical, and normative questions—over which we do have agency—to opaque technologies promising the comforts of a bygone, mythologized era. In the same way that activists are working to change the norms about trolling and actively creating safer spaces online for women, people of color, and other oppressed peoples, we can work to develop a moral language to understand our online obligations to distant sufferers. If we don’t, then this language will be developed for us, in code, and in secret, in ways more dystopian than even Postman could envision.

Still, I don’t want to just dismiss infoguilt as merely a trivial first world problem. It is, of course, a symptom of a deeply unjust world where such a surplus of pain and suffering confronts the most comfortable of us every day across the globe. And I don’t have the answer for the appropriate ways we should respond to all of the misfortune that confronts us everyday online. But I do think we need to fight back against the notion that this is a technological problem. Because big tech companies are quite willing to solve the problem of infoguilt for us with algorithmic curation of the news we receive. As more and more of our news comes to us filtered through Facebook and Twitter, algorithms could reduce the emotional strain of bad news by limiting our exposure to it without us even knowing. This begs the question, as Mark Andrejevic put it “what happens when we offload our ‘knowing’ onto the database (or algorithm) because the new forms of knowledge available are ‘too big’ for us to comprehend?” Facebook has already shown that it can subtly improve or depress our moods by shifting the content of our news feeds. And Zeynep Tufecki has written about the ways that Facebook’s algorithm inadvertently suppressed information about the protests in Ferguson and the brutal police response to them in the first hours of that nascent social movement. If we solve infoguilt with technological fixes like algorithmic filtering, it will likely be at tremendous cost to what’s left of our democratic public sphere.