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Does my brain look fat?

June 20, 2008

If supermarkets today decided to give away hot dogs for free, then more people would consume hot dogs at their cookouts this weekend and fewer people would consume hamburgers - even if people in general like hamburgers a bit more than hot dogs. Demand is elastic, and it tends to move in the opposite direction from price. Make something cheaper and people will buy more of it, often substituting it for something else they would have actually preferred to buy if the price hadn't changed. Give something away, and the effect will be magnified. We turn into gluttons, stuffing free hot dogs into our mouths until nausea sets in.

The price elasticity of demand applies to information as well as meat products. Make information free, and we'll become gluttons of information, as Rob Horning notes in an interesting post today:

As behavioral economists (most vociferously, Dan Ariely) have pointed out, we find the promise of free things hard to resist (even when a little thinking reveals that the free-ness is illusory). So when with very little effort we can accumulate massive amounts of “free” stuff from various places on the internet, we can easily end up with 46 days (and counting) worth of unplayed music on a hard drive. We end up with a permanent 1,000+ unread posts in our RSS reader, and a lingering, unshakable feeling that we’ll never catch up, never be truly informed, never feel comfortable with what we’ve managed to take in, which is always in the process of being undermined by the free information feeds we’ve set up for ourselves. We end up haunted by the potential of the free stuff we accumulate, and our enjoyment of any of it becomes severely impinged. The leisure and unparalleled bounty of a virtually unlimited access to culture ends up being an endless source of further stress, as we feel compelled to take it all in. Nothing sinks in as we try to rush through it all, and our rushing does nothing to keep us from falling further behind—often when I attempt to tackle the unread posts in my RSS reader, I end up finding new feeds to add, and so on, and I end up further behind than when I started.

Information may be free, but, as Horning explains, it exacts a price in the time required to collect, organize, and consume it. As we binge on the Net, the time available for other intellectual activities - like, say, thinking - shrinks. Eventually, we get bloated, mentally, and a kind of intellectual nausea sets in. But we can't stop because - hey - it's free.

And, yes, your brain does look fat.

Posted by nick at June 20, 2008 01:52 PM

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Comments

I get exactly this feeling when walking into a library. Since the 1970's, when I first got a library card, I've always been a glutton for free books.

Posted by: Greg L at June 20, 2008 02:13 PM

Given your addictive personality, you'll probably want to steer clear of the Net. It could get ugly.

Posted by: Nick Carr at June 20, 2008 03:18 PM

Another irony is the prioritization that takes place. Those 1,000+ unread posts mostly have short term value. In two weeks, the information they contain will be worthless. Therefore it seems that I need to read them right away, ahead of the history book I bought (the content of which will be just as valuable in two weeks).

The question of course is whether in two weeks I will be better off having read the by-then-worthless posts or the history book...

Posted by: William Vambenepe at June 20, 2008 03:50 PM

If your feed items lose their value in 2 weeks, you're reading different feeds than I am. I subscribe to over 1000 feeds and when I go back through the stuff that I mark as interesting out of 30,000+ items a month (~950 in the last 30 days), the vast majority are of long term value.

Those that had a short shelflife weren't that interesting to me whether they were new or not. The kind of post that needs to be read within a day of its posting in order to be interesting is not something I'm looking for even when it's fresh.

In part, that's why I actually like being a week or 2 behind on my feed reading. It makes it obvious what's worth ditching without a second glance.

Posted by: J Wynia at June 20, 2008 04:35 PM

I can say from personal experience (that was a long time ago, of course) that you only actually watch a fraction of everything you download from p2p or similar sources. You just get them because they are there, they are free and you may want to watch them eventually, maybe. Then they languish in your hard drive or go to increase your environmentally harmful pile of recordable DVDs.

Posted by: Juan Parra at June 23, 2008 03:12 AM

And what of "free" Social Networking? First I got on Twitter so as not to be left behind by my Hip Digeratti friends. Then Twitter's instability sent me looking for an alternative. Pownce and Jaiku emerged. Though I limited the number of people I follow to 10, the gusher of Tweets, Pownces and Jaiku's is consuming. (Not to mention Social Networking is 75% Noise, 20 % Fun and 5% useful)

So, I'm now off all 3 and will now return to my New Year's resolution. One Weekend Day a week, is "Net Free"! The rest of the time I can be an information glutton.

Posted by: Mike Whatley at June 23, 2008 11:31 AM

Please explain to me why my thinking will shrink as I use the web?

I disagree with you simply because I find that I can stop. Isn't it then a matter of discipline?

Posted by: Zhak Lyn at September 14, 2008 03:56 AM

Does my brain look fat?

June 20, 2008

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