"Would you throw your pet off a cliff for £1 million?" I posed this dilemma in a recent survey. Seven percent of the British public said yes. The same survey also included a quiz of general knowledge and current events. I found that there was a correlation between how well people did on the quiz and how they answered the cliff question. The least knowledgeable were most likely to sacrifice their pet for cash.
This was not an isolated finding. In scores of surveys conducted in the UK and the US, general knowledge correlated not only with socially responsible behaviour, but with income (even allowing for educational level and age), self-reported health and happiness. Knowledge matters, even in the mobile device age.
That's why it's important to make the most of the many hours we spend following the news online or elsewhere. Now you can let your friends crowdsource your news, choosing which stories appear in your news feed. You can configure news aggregators and your TV remote to deliver a bespoke version of the day's events, one tailored to your interests, tastes and prejudices. It's The Daily Me, the news purged of anything personally irrelevant or dull.
Visionaries have long touted customisable media, but it's now claimed that our surfeit of media choices actually drives political polarisation and is to be blamed for phenomena ranging from Brexit to Donald Trump. But there's another effect of customised news that gets little attention and may be equally as disturbing: narrowcasting makes us stupid.
At least, it makes us less informed. My knowledge survey asked participants questions about the news, history, geography, literature, science, the arts and pop culture. The questions were roughly what you'd encounter in a trivia game: What is the capital of Canada? What is the religion of the Dalai Lama? Locate Antarctica on an unlabelled world map. Which is correct, "veil of tears" or "vale of tears?"
The surveys also asked people which news and information sources they followed. In general, those who got their news from TV news, social networks or internet news aggregators were less informed than those who get their news from radio or newspapers. Most people in the survey followed more than one news source and the average number was 4.5. I didn't average people who said they got all their news from Facebook, but the average of everyone who reported getting some news from Facebook. My averaging is a simple, though ham-handed, methodology that detected a lot of difference between news sources.
People who followed one high-scoring news source tended to follow other high-scoring sources. Likewise, audiences for low-scoring sources followed other low-scoring sources, helping account for the substantial differences in average scores. It's worth noting that any given news source has its own demographics. As advertisers are aware, readers of The Times are better educated than Tumblr users. Thus it's not surprising that certain news sources have better-informed audiences.
Yet when you look past individual sources and at the overall pattern, new media audiences know less than old media audiences. I believe this is in part because these legacy media are more difficult to customise.
Newspapers and radio newscasts offer a fixed encapsulation of the day's news, with a beginning, middle and end. Editors decide what's news - the audience doesn't. The audience tends to absorb the full survey. They may be half-listening or skimming much of the time, but they're less likely to change the channel or be tempted by clickbait. They learn what the news editors think they should learn.
This defies the anti-elitist ethos of our digital culture. We extrapolate the virtues of free choice to conclude that more choice is always better. But maybe that's the wrong way to think of it.
Ulysses had himself tied to the mast of his ship, so he could hear the music of the sirens without succumbing to their fatal lures. Today a "Ulysses pact" describes a vow or contract that restricts freedom of choice for one's own good. You make one big decision not to let yourself make many little, dumb decisions. That's essentially what audiences of high-scoring media do. They delegate news professionals to assemble a balanced view of the day's news and expose themselves to ideas that they might not have sought out, acquiring the rarest commodity in the mediascape: the big picture.
Customisation is like a McDonald's burger: OK in moderation, as long as you get a balanced diet otherwise. You are what you know.
William Poundstone is a bestselling American author. His latest book is "Head in the Cloud: The Power of Knowledge in the age of Google" (Oneworld)
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
