Because if I'm scared to say it, it's probably worth saying

January 10 2010

Blindness in high resolution

We are obsessed with seeing our world in the highest resolution possible.

We want our television in high definition and our movies in Blu-ray. We want our news from all corners of the world at all hours of the day. We want to measure every detail and every dollar in our businesses. We want to know each other’s every thought on Twitter and Facebook. We want our emails, photos and digital souvenirs at our fingertips so we can recreate any moment from our past.
[Image of TV static - Turn on images to view]
We want all this detail right now. On our computers, on our phones, at the gym, in the bathroom, next to our beds when we wake up in the morning. No matter where we are, no matter what we are doing, we need our detail stream and we need it now.

Details soothe us. They make us feel connected to our world and in control of our lives. They make us feel safe from illusion and deception and surprise.

It’s soothing to believe that if only we had more details, we could begin to see the whole picture. And if we could see the whole picture, then there’s nothing that could surprise us, nothing we wouldn’t know and maybe even nothing that could hurt us.

But what if the whole picture isn’t the sum of the details? In fact, what if the whole picture has nothing at all to do with the details?

When we watch an actor in high definition, we see every blemish on his face but none of the blemishes on his character.

When we track the path of every dollar in our businesses, we see what’s making money but not the invisible market forces that make it possible to make that money.

When we share every thought and feeling, whether online or the old fashioned way, we see what it’s like to be inside our heads and hearts but none of the unconscious plate tectonics that drive all of it.

This partial blindness is the best case. It assumes that we can consume a mountain of details and still find time to make sense of them. That we can divide signal from the misleading noise that looks like signal. That all of this detail doesn’t seduce us into believing we know and understand more than we do.

There’s also a worst case: that we are exhausting ourselves looking for the wrong things in the wrong places. All because we want to avoid the very things that make life worth living – the things we don’t know, the things that can surprise us and the things that can hurt us.

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  • Ahh, your talking a language I've seen and read many times during graduate studies. At a high level, you've identified one of the key ramifications of living in the information age - the constant and ubiquitous flow of data. Indeed many researchers have challenged themselves by looking at this trend through various socio-technical lenses. I worked with a graduate student who focused on the changing growth and maintenance of romantic relationships and how IM, Facebook, etc has changed the nature in which we connect with others. I've also met researchers that have looked at this trend from a purely economic standpoint, and examined the growth in market places and changes in buying and selling habits due to the constant update of information.

    I personally, have made a career of this trend. In what you call partial blindness, as a human factors research I call sense-making and information overload. I spend most of my days in the weeds trying to design systems for workers that are overburdened with managing information. The proper fusion of information can offer a competitive advantage that is often sought by businesses ( for monetary gain) and governments (for military gain). To accomplish this I design systems, a combination of technologies and expected human interactions, that in unison operate harmoniously (theoretically atleast) to achieve a common goal. In my context, I work with emergency responders so the competitive advantage equates to faster decision making to achieve the common goal of saving lives.

    My challenge to you, is to think of this: In what context or lens does this trend effect you the most? Perhaps the answer lies in what sparked this idea in the first place?
  • Great stuff Ben. Can I volunteer my life and detail stream as your research subjects? I would love some sort of lens that would help me focus on the details that would help me live better. This is such an important area of work you're in.

    To answer your question about what area of my life this comes up in most, I'll give you two: my closest relationships (romantic and very close friends) and my distant but important professional relationships.

    In the close relationships, I tend to lose the forest for the trees. In my more distant professional relationships, I feel like I either tune out entirely for days at a time from these e-mails and social feeds because it's too much, or when I tune in, they take up way too much time and attention and I feel like I'm checking a box rather than enriching my life.
  • Great comments. I'm getting the sense that the "white noise" of info that Barbara mentions can cut both ways -- it can soothing or unsettling
  • Manager, Bow & Arrow Press
    Details don't soothe me.
  • barbaramillershreibman
    Think it's about fear and control. Information prevents us from feeling empty and powerless. It takes personal integrity to admit one doesn't know, and especially to operate without superficial information. It also takes a certain kind of intuition and intelligence to be willing to search out information that isn't high def and be comfortable with the unseen. The constant stream of information and detail has, for me, become white noise.
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