The Internet of Us Read Free Page A

quickly starting to feel indispensable. It is our go-to way of forming beliefs about the world. Second, most Google-knowing is already fast. By that, I don’t just mean that our searches are fast—although that is true; if you have a reasonable connection, searches on major engines like Bing and Google deliver results in less than a second. What I mean is that when you look up something on your phone, the information you get isn’t the result of much effort on your part. You are engaging quick, relatively non-reflective cognitive processes. In other words, when we access information online, when we try to “Google-know,” we engage in an activity that is composed of a host of smaller cognitive processesticking along beneath the surface of attention. Third, and as a result of the first two points, we often adopt an attitude of default trust toward digitally acquired information. It therefore tends to swamp other ways of knowing; we pay attention to it more.
    That is not surprising. Google-knowing is often (although not always) fast and easy. If you consult a roughly reliable source (like Wikipedia) and engage cognitive processes that are generally reliable in that specific context, then you are being receptive to the facts out there in the world. You are tracking what is true—and that is what being a receptive knower is all about. You may not be able to explain why that particular bit of information is true; you may not have made a study of whether the source is really reliable; but you are learning. So, can’t we still say that you are knowing in one important sense?
    We can. And we do. But Google-knowing is knowing only if you consult a reliable source and your unconscious brain is working the way you’d consciously like it to.
    If. There, as always, is the rub.
    John Locke Agrees with Mom
    The day following the bombing of the Boston Marathon in April 2013, social media was clogged with posts of a man in a red shirt holding a wounded woman. The picture was tragic, and the posts made it more so: they told us that the man had planned to propose to the woman when she finished the marathon—until the bomb went off. Hundreds of thousands of people reposted and tweeted the story, often contributing moving comments of their own.
    The story, however, proved to be false. The man had not beenplanning to propose to the woman. They weren’t even acquainted. Nor was it true, as was widely reported even in the “mainstream” media (I heard it on my local NPR station the day of the bombing), that the authorities had purposefully shut down cell phone service in Boston (the system simply was flooded with too much traffic). These were rumors, circulating at the speed of tweet.
    Rumors like this are also examples of the widely discussed phenomenon of information cascades —a phenomenon to which the Internet and social media are particularly susceptible. 7 Information cascades happen when people post or otherwise voice their opinions in a sequence. If the first expressions of opinion form a pattern, then this fact alone can begin to outweigh or alter later opinions. People later in the sequence tend to follow the crowd more than their own private evidence. The mere fact that so many people prior have voiced a particular opinion—especially if they are in some sense within your social circle—the more likely it is that you’ll go with that opinion too, or at least give it more weight. Social scientists (and advertising executives) who have studied this phenomenon have used it to explain not only how information often moves around the Internet, but how and why songs and YouTube videos become popular. The more people have “liked” a video, the greater the chance even more people will like it, and pretty soon you end up with “Gangnam Style” and “What Does the Fox Say?”
    Information cascades are hardly new. The mob mentality has worked its dark magic as long