Diatribes of Jay: The “TMI Effect” and How to Save Democracy from Facebook

[For Democrats’ core values, click here. The Last Adult is Leaving the White House. Who will Shut Off the Lights? For how our two parties lost their souls, click here. For the dire portent of Putin’s high-fiving the Saudi Crown Prince, click here. For updated advice on how to drive on the Sun’s power alone, or without fossil fuels, click here. For a 2018 Thanksgiving Message, click here. For a list of links to recent posts in reverse chronological order, click here.]

Introduction
1. Drowning in TMI
2. Obsessive-compulsive responses to TMI
3. Psychological pathologies
4. Anonymous-sourced “news”
5. Believing in bulk
6. Letting your guard down
7. Facebook doing it all
Conclusion

Introduction

In common parlance, the initials “TMI” stand for “too much information.” My fiancée uses them whenever I put too much detail into a story, or whenever my details drift into biology in a way that offends her finer sensibilities.

The similar term “information overload” smacks of machines, computer systems, and global politics. It sits well in the mouths of nerds. In contrast, “TMI” is simpler and more human. It applies equally to individuals and machines. It fits anything from the oral telling of an anecdote to an algorithm digesting terabytes of data per minute.

What does “TMI” have to do with Facebook? As it turns out, plenty. Today Facebook stands accused of crushing personal privacy, supercharging hate, and destroying democracy with targeted disinformation and “fake news.”

Virtually all these charges focus in part on Facebook’s scope, scale and relentless global growth. According to a must-read profile, these aspects of Facebook’s business have been singular obsessions of its CEO Mark Zuckerberg. His early drive was to grow the Facebook “network” at all costs and to “Move fast and break things.”

That he has done. He has all but broken personal privacy by selling private user data to businesses, in addition to advertising. He has broken cultural taboos on racism, bigotry, misogyny and homophobia by allowing haters to post on Facebook. And he has gone a long way to aid our nation’s enemies, both domestic and foreign, in breaking democracy.

Zuckerberg’s single-minded quest for growth above all has made all three evil effects worse. Invasions of privacy get worse the more people’s private lives are revealed to more strangers. Hate breeds more violence and distrust when spread more widely. “Fake news” undermines democracy quicker the more voters see and believe it.

But details matter. The question is not what Facebook does, but how it does it. Broadcast radio and TV started reaching millions of people a century ago. Today, with the help of satellites, they can easily reach an audience comparable to the “[m]ore than 2.2 billion people, about a third of humanity, [who] log in [to Facebook] at least once a month.” But nothing quite like the impact of Facebook ever attended broadcast media, although Rupert Murdoch’s Fox gave it the old college try.

So precisely what gave Facebook, almost unbidden, the world-changing and global-order-destroying power that a century of broadcasting, also now made global, never attained?

The answer, I think, is an Internet capability remarked mostly by social-science theorists, seldom by nerds. The Internet is the first global medium to feature “many-to-many” communication, as distinguished from “one-to-one” (the telephone and telegraph) or “one-to-many” (traditional radio and television broadcasting). In theory, if Facebook signed up the approximately two-thirds of our human species that are not now its subscribers, every single member of our species could communicate with every other through Facebook. That’s something new under the Sun!

Why does it matter? The “extra dimension” of many-to-many communications multiples TMI in two ways. The first is an obvious multiplication of sources. Today it’s impossible for any single individual even to follow the daily news output of the six cable news networks—ABC, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, NBC and PBS. How much more impossible is it for anyone to follow the daily output of Facebook’s 2.2 billion subscribers?

But the second way Facebook generates killer TMI is the clincher: unfamiliarity. Habitual viewers of cable networks can come to know the various news shows and their anchors and pundits. Often viewers can predict how they will report events, and how they might overreact to or twist things. With upwards of 2.2 billion possible “announcers,” that familiarity is impossible, even in theory. So receivers of what purports to be “news” on Facebook must either discard it utterly or assume it’s valid, unless they have the time to compare it to news from other sources and evaluate it fully.

In other words, when the source of your “news” can be anywhere and anyone on the planet, you have no basis for discounting or evaluating it other than comparing it to other sources. The need to do so vastly complicates the process of evaluating and crediting information—well beyond the simple expedient of crediting a known and respected source.

Unfortunately, that’s precisely what social media like Facebook have done to the average consumer of news from the Internet, at least the younger ones. In a single generation—and largely without training or instruction—social media have goaded the average Internet news consumer into abandoning a single or few trusted news sources in favor of myriad unknown sources, each of which could originate anywhere and with anyone on Earth.

That fact alone—the explosion of TMI occasioned by global, many-to-many communication—is responsible for most, if not all, of the social-media pathologies that researchers have observed so far. Here’s how:

1. Drowning in TMI.

Suppose you’re an adolescent smart enough not to confuse your personal self-worth with the sheer number of your artificial “Friends” on Facebook. Suppose instead you’re content with naming as “Friends” just the 25 peers whom you see and actually interact with occasionally at school and in your neighborhood. And suppose all of them are just as smart and only so name their 25 real-world friends as well.

If you also limit your Facebook privacy circle to “Friends of Friends,” then the circle will number 650. Lo, all of a sudden, willy nilly, you will have more “Friends” than probably 95% of people of my generation would have ever used that term to describe. All of them can communicate with you—about anything from a cool joke, through their athletic or dating prowess, to stuff their siblings, parents or teachers said. And since they’re on line, they can write you any time of the day or night, all 650 of them.

Now suppose every one of them posts a paragraph and a photo every five days. Then you have 130 paragraphs—maybe forty pages with photos—to read every single day, probably more on weekends and holidays. That’s likely to be more pages than you are assigned to read for your classes, at least until your college years. If you spend five minutes reading and responding to each post, that’s 200 minutes per day, or 3 hours, twenty minutes.

How do you keep up? How do you read and view all this stuff, day after day? It never ends. And snarky interactions on line or in the real world can penalize you if you don’t keep up. You could lose “Friends.” You could be made the butt of jokes or teasing. You could even be bullied online.

And so you have this 3 hour, 20 minute per day never-ending chore. It’s above and beyond all you do to study, maintain real-world relationships with your family and actual-face-time friends, engage in sports, or enjoy hobbies, music, specialized learning, or just restful “down time.”

If you sleep the eight hours recommended for youth and take a half-hour for each of three meals, this torrent of TMI sucks up nearly a quarter of the rest of your life. That’s a burden that previous generations of youth never had. And the less you limit your “Friends” (and them theirs!) to a real-life-possible numbers—the more you play the numbers game and go for quantity of “Friends,” not quality—the more the TMI assaulting you daily spins out of control.

Erratum: Earlier versions of this post assumed that the circle of “Friends” would have to include both “Friends of Friends” and “Friends of Friends of Friends” to reach a total of 625. That was a plain arithmetic error: 25 x 25 = 625, and the original 25 “Friends” adds to 650. I regret the error, which actually obscured the point about TMI made here. It only takes two levels of “Friends,” not three, to attain a potentially unbearable burden of TMI.

2. Obsessive-compulsive responses to TMI.

Once you start down this road, running down it every day becomes an obsession and a compulsion. You feel an obligation to respond to every e-mail notification of a post to or about you, and you feel a duty to read and respond to the post.

How do I know? Because something similar happened to me. It happened to me as a hardened, disciplined, veteran of three professions (science, law and law teaching), even at the age of 73. It happened even though I don’t use my Facebook account and completely ignore all the e-mail that Google’s Gmail automatically (and mercifully) tosses into “Social Media” and “Promotions” categories. My temporary downfall (now ameliorated) arose out of ordinary e-mail, not even social media, as described in a footnote.

The key to my understanding and correcting my own obsessive-compulsive conduct was noticing that I don’t do anything similar with offline newspapers printed on dead trees. My fiancée has a paper subscription to the New York Times’ print version, and I read it almost daily when at her home. Something about having to turn actual paper pages makes it easy to push the news aside when I have other, more important things to do. Often the paper lies mussed up on the breakfast table or the couch, with even stories I once thought worth reading neglected.

Not online. There’s something about the linear appearance of online media—and the ease of scrolling down—that demands attention and completion. So even I found myself reading all the online headlines in the Times’ daily newsletter on the arts and sports, although I have little interest in stories about artists and virtually none in professional sports. My compulsion to complete got the better of me.

Maybe I’m unusual. Maybe teens are smarter and more self-protective than I. But I think not. If I can fall into this trap after three highly disciplined careers and at the age of 73, and when my remaining time is short, surely teens can fall into it more easily when they have yet to establish strong habits of discipline, their interests are eclectic, and their remaining time on Earth seems infinite.

So bear with me, gentle reader, while I explore some logical consequences of the hypothesis that TMI in digital media is uniquely entrancing and compelling, especially when, as in Facebook, it seems to be mostly about you or come from your “Friends.”

3. Psychological pathologies.

If you accept the hypothesis of obsessive-compulsive behavior in reading and responding to social media, a lot of personal pathologies follow. The Web never sleeps. It never takes a vacation. It never gets sick and it never rests. It’s always on duty, even when you aren’t. So if you let it, it will treat you like a slave.

The first thing you will notice is that you have trouble keeping up. The TMI rushing at you makes you feel pressured, always falling behind, always a bit inadequate. And the more “Friends” you have—the more you try to keep up with them even though you rarely or never see them outside of cyberspace—the more pressured, failing, and inadequate you feel.

As you spend more and more time trying to keep up, you spend less and less time on things you actually enjoy doing solely for themselves: interacting with your siblings or non-cyberspace friends, playing sports or cards, listening to music, or just getting outside in the fresh air. You will also spend less time doing school work, and you may tend to shirk work that you do for money. Your grades and your “professional” reputation can suffer.

If you avoid sports and other exercise, your health will suffer, too. You won’t notice this at first, because you are young. But exercise is one of the ways the human body fights tension, stress, and fatigue. If your obsession with social media keeps you from sports and exercise, your lack of exercise will increase your feelings of stress, tension, and anxiety. It will exacerbate your feeling of being on an online treadmill; but unlike working out on a real treadmill, it won’t improve your wind, your health, or your sense of calm and relaxation. This is what we call a vicious circle; if it goes on long enough, it can lead to clinical depression.

These conclusions come not only from my own introspection. Careful studies of youth show that the incidences of anxiety and lonliness rise with use of social media. And that stands to reason. The joys of youth are being outdoors, using your young body to do miraculous things, and developing your social skills by interacting in the real world, where you can see people’s faces, “smell” their pheromones, and hear every intonation of their voices. The more you give up these pleasures for staring at an electronic screen, the more you deprive yourself of the delights of being young. How better to court clinical depression?

My stepfather was a writer and one of the wisest men I’ve even known. When he thought I was working too hard, he warned me, “No one, on his death bed, ever bemoaned not spending more time at the office.” If that’s true of work that provides financial rewards and a character-sustaining career, how much more is it true of spending time in a dark room poring over social media?

But that’s not all. There’s one more subtlety. Insecure people who think that having large numbers of Facebook “Friends” validates them as people can easily find more than the rest of us. They can start by “Friending” people they barely know and then “Friending” every one whom those “Friends” suggest for “Friending,” plus their “Friends,” and so on.

But what does this mean? It means that the most insecure people, the ones with the least interesting lives and the weakest wills, are most likely to encounter serious TMI, which puts them under time pressure and stress and further erodes their capacity for sound judgment. This scenario is tailor-made for softening up weak minds for fake news, propaganda and disinformation.

4. Anonymous-sourced “news.”

Unfortunately, Facebook’s deleterious effects on avid users only begins with turning the joys of youth into a never-ending online treadmill. Even more disastrous are its effects in killing skepticism and increasing gullibility.

Ever since the invention of newspapers, readers have been able to know the sources of their news. A newspaper’s title and masthead reveal the corporate entity, its owners and who runs and controls the newsroom. Reporters’ bylines tell who reported and wrote each story. As you read a particular journal, you get to know the various authors. You can judge their skill in writing and thinking. You can come to know their quirks, prejudices and blind spots. Then you can make allowances for their personal capacities and failings in determining what to believe.

Facebook is completely different. It allows chains of “Friends of Friends” so long and complex that the average user may has no idea who many of them are. Even if they use their real names, a user remote in a chain may “know” them only as a monicker, not as a person.

So you will not necessarily know the author of what you read on Facebook, either personally or professionally. In our example of 25 “Friends” and 650 total “Friends” and “Friends of Friends,” you will know for sure only your own 25, at least at the outset. That’s less than 4% of the total. And if some writers forward others’ posts or Tweets without attribution, you will not know a post’s true source even then.

Traditional reporting of news greatly disfavors anonymous sources. Reporters do use them from time to time, but only when the source has a good reason for remaining anonymous. Reporters can and do analyze the reasons: good reasons tend to corroborate, rather than undermine, the sources’ credibility. An example is a whistleblower or low-level White House employee testifying to others’ wrongdoing anonymously, so as not to be fired or suffer other retaliation by the wrongdoers. Apart from cases like this, reporters routinely name the sources of their news, so that you, the reader, can know both the source and his or her position in life in evaluating his or her credibility.

Why is it important to know who the sources of news are? People lie, exaggerate, mislead and “spin.” They also make inadvertent mistakes. People tout themselves and their work and businesses when perhaps they don’t deserve praise. This is just common sense, part of every person’s basic life skill. Newspapers give you the means to exercise that skill. Television does, too: often you can see the source and look in his or her eyes, right on the TV screen.

In denying you the ability even to know who are the key sources of your news, Facebook deprives you of the chance to exercise this basic life skill. It turns you into a child listening to adults’ instructions, or to their fairy tales.

This sad fact is not merely a result of Facebook’s peculiar operation, or of any other social media’s. It’s an intrinsic property of any form of many-to-many communication. Ordinary people who post online reveal or link their sources only if they have prior experience or training as journalists or academics, so that citing sources is, for them, a routine part of basic professionalism. Most people who lack this sort of experience not only fail to reveal sources; they sometimes confuse facts with opinion and can even get basic historical facts wrong. (In another many-to-many medium—online comments on news articles—I have seen comment authors express disbelief that Cuba was ever a US colony.)

5. Believing in bulk.

In general there are only three ways to recognize a lie. First, you might coincidentally know the truth and see the contradiction. But that won’t happen often with fake news because the whole idea of “news,” fake or otherwise, is telling you something you don’t already know, usually some breaking current event.

The second way to recognize a lie is to know the speaker‘s motivation for lying. But you can’t do that if you don’t know who the speaker is. Facebook, with its many anonymous sources, is dangerous precisely because it doesn’t reveal the ultimate source of many a claim, preventing you from even asking whether the source has a motive to lie.

The final way to tell a lie is to compare similar stories from other sources and see whether and how they match. If at least some of the other sources are known, and if the majority contradict the one you are scrutinizing, you are probably safe in going with the majority. I call this “believing in bulk.”

But on Facebook and other social media this expedient is no longer safe. Why? On social media it’s possible, and sometimes easy, for liars to create a false “majority.” They can use trolls and bots and other technical means to post many similar false stories anonymously or under fake names. So if you rely on “believing in bulk” today, you can become a sitting duck for Russian, Chinese and other foreign intelligence services, as well as for professional liars employed by political parties and candidates. All these professional masters of lying now know full well how to use bots, trolls and other, more sinister, means of multiplying their Internet lies.

If you seek truth and certainty in an uncertain social media world, you won’t find it by “believing in bulk.” You’ll find it only by believing in quality, namely the quality of reliable, known sources of news with no known motive to lie. Since social media thrive on anonymous and unknown sources, “believing in bulk” simply won’t work any more.

6. Letting your guard down.

The treadmill aspect of social media has other consequences besides stress, fatigue, anxiety and depression. Scrolling through, let alone responding to, posts of people you barely know (“Friends of Friends” and “Friends of Friends of Friends,” not to mention anonymous commenters) can become really boring and tedious.

At first it may seem interesting. But as the days turn to weeks and reading and responding become chores, the marriage of one barely-known person and another’s high-school graduation (let alone a third’s blind date) all seem to blend together.

This is where “clickbait” comes alive. In this boring, tedious, monotonous environment, the only things that stand out (besides key life events of real-life relatives and close friends) are stories that are unusual, surprising and sensational. They are what you come to seek, and they are what you remember. They are what you click on to “learn more.” And so they are the definition of “clickbait.”

In Senate testimony, Facebook has admitted that catching your attention through clickbait is part of its business model. That means its corporate and political clients pay to do everything they can to grab your attention through ads and “news” that are unusual, surprising and sensational.

For political clients, how better to create effective clickbait than through stories that seem too bizarre to be true?

In buying and selling, most of us know that, if something seems too good to be true, it probably isn’t. For example, if a salesman tells you a small compact car can go from zero to 60 MPH in a single second, you’re unlikely to believe him, at least if you know much about cars. But somehow when a political poster says things equally bizarre, social media freaks will often believe him, especially if the bizarre assertions comport with their pre-existing political prejudices or ideologies.

Three aspects of Facebook induce users to let their guards down to fake news and other lies. The first is the boredom and tedium of the social-media treadmill. The second is the lie’s appearance in the midst of routine notices of unquestionable veracity: relatives and “Friends” reporting real events in their own lives, with motives, perhaps, to exaggerate, but not to make things up out of whole cloth.

Third and final is the stress, fatigue and haste with which many users approach clearing their inboxes of Facebook notifications. Feelings of impatience and stress amplify the outrage that users feel in crediting “fake news” that presses their personal buttons. That outrage, occasioned in part by the stress and tedium of the social media treadmill, gives the coup de grace to skepticism and disbelief.

Why doesn’t this happen in print media? I think for three reasons. First, print media are “always there” because they exist in real space. They don’t evoke fears of vanishing from a screen or being lost, forgotten or mislaid by pressing the wrong key.

Second, print newspapers don’t have inboxes of notifications addressed to you personally, which you feel you have to empty. So they don’t evoke the same compulsive pressure to read, view and respond. Print media just don’t create the stress, impatience, and haste that trying to get through your personal inbox does.

Finally, print media (at least reputable ones) name sources and have reputations to maintain. Barely known sources on social media do not.

7. Facebook doing it all.

Facebook stands out among social media because it’s the giant. It reportedly has 2.2 billion subscribers worldwide.

But that’s not the most important aspect of Facebook’s size. It also tries to do everything. What started as an online means to keep college buddies interacting and socially engaged morphed into a tool of business that every firm now thinks it has to use, in addition to having its own website. Then Facebook morphed again into a tool of political information, disinformation and propaganda that every candidate and cause wants to use, and that Russian intelligence used to help elect Donald Trump president.

No one much cares if college buddies exaggerate or lie when they interact socially amongst themselves. And while businesses, too, can exaggerate and lie, they face limits, both legal and social, at least when they identify themselves. Of course every business on Facebook has every incentive to identify itself and its products or services. Have you ever heard of an anonymous Facebook page for a business?

So the main focus of evil spawned by Facebook is and ought to be its supplanting news media and serving as a massive conduit for “fake news,” propaganda, disinformation, and demagoguery. For it’s precisely in those applications that Facebook users have the greatest motivation to hide or confuse their real identities.

This analysis suggests some simple legislative and regulatory expedients to control Facebook’s most widely reviled impact: serving as the indispensable global platform for lies, fake news, disinformation and propaganda. First, Facebook as a company could be broken up, leaving the buddy-bonding and business markets in place but putting the politics inside another, more tightly controlled corporate entity.

Second, legislation could require Facebook (if not broken up)—or a separate political platform (the forced spinoff)—to rigorously disclose the party creating each political post and the underlying source(s) of information if not that party.

Accurately disclosing sources would cause no difficulty under the First Amendment, for it would not require controlling the content of the communication or becoming an arbiter of “Truth.” It would not force Zuckerberg to develop artificial-intelligence algorithms for “Truth,” but simply to identify what is “political.” A broad approach to that question would be appropriate, because the sole consequence of an affirmative finding would be mandating disclosures of sources. Every post about a political candidate or office holder, party, or cause ought to qualify, as should most posts about identifiable social groups with social or political grievances.

Finally, the law could provide strong motivation for accurate disclosure of the sources of the post and (if different) the underlying information by imposing significant fines for political postings made without the required disclosures. Fines as high as $500,000 per unsourced post would get Facebook’s attention and motivate compliance. This expedient would impose no prior restraint; instead, it would impose only permissible “time, place and manner” restraints on communication, by requiring additional important information about sources.

Conclusions.

The reason why Facebook has had such an outsized and sudden impact on human society is that it’s something truly new under the Sun. It’s not just another website, newspaper or broadcaster.

In a way, it’s a system that already gives one-third of our human species the ability to set up their own newspapers (focused mainly on the “society pages”) with minimal investments of capital and time. It is—as Zuckerberg constantly insists in ducking responsibility for the vast harm Facebook has done—just a platform. But it’s a platform the like of which our human species has never seen before.

There are other examples of many-to-many communication today. There are product reviews on Amazon and elsewhere. There are reader comments on online news stories. Both allow multiple creators to reach audiences of many. But these examples of many-to-many communication are limited by their purposes. Product reviews discuss the products reviewed. Online comments discuss the stories commented on. The big difference is that Facebook posts can discuss anything: personal stories, businesses and their products and services, and any aspect of politics, including fake news and propaganda.

As a many-to-many medium, Facebook originated for friendships and personal matters. It later adapted to business. Its recruitment for politics was perhaps inadvertent, until it added significantly to Facebook’s revenue. In retrospect it seems an unfortunate accident—a massive airplane crash putting global democracy at risk.

The question before us is how to ameliorate that risk most quickly and effectively. We cannot do it, either effectively or (under the First Amendment) legally by making Zuckerberg and his underlings arbiters of Truth. And there is no algorithm that can serve that function; there may never be. Even if there were, its use by or for anyone in government would violate the First Amendment.

Zuckerberg reportedly has tried to develop algorithms to detect “hate speech.” Those efforts would be laughable, if they were not doomed to both legal and practical irrelevance. A better way to detect hate speech would be to appoint three-person arbitral committees, each consisting of two members and one non-member of a hated group, with a supervisor to step in if and when a committee produced too many two-to-one decisions by the hated-group members.

At this primitive stage of so-called “artificial intelligence,” no one wants an algorithm doing a person’s job, let alone in such a fraught field as hate speech. Yet if hate speech and more subtle dog whistles were properly identified as coming from the Klu Klux Klan, Neo-Nazis or their lesser-known equivalents, it might not be necessary to suppress them at all. The chief danger of modern hate groups is that they keep a “low profile” and disguise their nature and origins, and social media like Facebook often let them.

No one really complains much about the exaggeration, boasting and lies that are endemic to personal posts, even among supposed “Friends.” No one much complains about misinformation on the myriad business pages on Facebook, in part because existing laws of false advertising and trade libel control exaggeration and lying by businesses through litigation directed at the source. Rather, the crux of Facebook’s deleterious social and political effects lies primarily in political speech.

So Congress ought to pass a law requiring that all posts of a political nature on Facebook and other social media be stamped prominently with their origin and the origin of their information. Sources should be stated not just with technical accuracy, but with real meaning. Imagine, for example, what might have happened if each bit of fake news from Russia’s Internet Research Agency had come stamped with a big legend, right under the title, reading as follows:

”Brought to you by the Internet Research Agency (“IRA”), St. Petersburg, Russia. The IRA is an official operation of Russian intelligence. It’s working hard to elect Donald Trump as president by presenting racist material to both whites and blacks to get them to distrust Hillary Clinton and Democrats. As far as Facebook can tell, the IRA made up the substance of this post; we could find no credible external source.”

Such labels on fake news wouldn’t break any law or violate any constitutional principle. Facebook could still collect revenue from the liars, at least until they wised up. Labeling wouldn’t cost Facebook much, although researching the labels would require staffing some news operations. Tracing Internet Protocol (IP) addresses and proxy servers, plus comparing fake news to real news, would be a lot easier to automate than determining what is Truth. (As an alternative, the law could require Facebook not to publish political posts from untraceable sources, easing Facebook’s technological burden of tracing.) It’s all worth a try, isn’t it?

The First Amendment generally precludes controlling the content of political speech, even if inaccurate. The reason is that our culture treats dialogue, not authority, as the sole legitimate means of finding Truth. But identifying both the source of questionable speech and the sources of the information in it would go a long way toward “defanging” disinformation, fake news and deliberate lies.

Forcing that identification with stiff fines for failing to make it could help curb Facebook’s mostly inadvertent assault on democracy and civil society. Then civil society might just have the time for teaching and experience to reduce the less disastrous, mostly personal, consequences of mushrooming TMI.

Footnote 1: In addition to e-mail of a personal and business nature, I get lots of news on line. I subscribe online to the Washington Post, and I get both its and the New York Times’ daily online newsletters. During the political crunch just before and after Trump’s election, I started reading Daily Kos, a progressive, near-daily, free-of-charge online newsletter with headlines linking to stories by obscure screen-named authors, nearly all unknown to me. And then the Times and the Post started up various other headline newsletters—one by the Times’ David Leonhardt (my favorite journalist) on his and other journalists’ opinion pieces, and one by the Post on science and technology.

Soon I found I was drowning in TMI. I spent hours per day just clearing my e-mail. When I skipped a day or two for work on this blog, social engagements, or travel, it was a big chore to catch up. I’ve since developed a few personal strategies to cut down the mass of material. But the chore remains alive, daily, seductive, demanding, and never-ending.

Footnote 2: Facebook earns “more ad revenue in a year than all American newspapers combined.” Links to Popular Recent Posts

Diatribes of Jay

26 December 2018

The “TMI Effect” and How to Save Democracy from Facebook

Links to Popular Recent Posts

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