外刊阅读20240816｜社媒时代的新型垃圾食品

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We are, after all, a species of information foragers. We spend our lives learning about our world and how to manipulate it. We forage individually, noticing patterns, experimenting, learning the signs of opportunity or danger and testing mental predictions. We also forage collectively, watching and copying one another, teaching our children and peers, sharing observations, gossiping and making collective sense of the world.

We have evolved to enjoy learning for its own sake. Evolution has influenced behaviors that, in some environments, are associated with reproductive success: sleep when tired, take shelter when cold, eat when hungry and have sex when feeling desire. These behaviors, learning included, increase our evolutionary fitness, so we have evolved to find them pleasurable. Historically, information was scarce. But over the past 30 years, we have fashioned the Internet into a direct pipeline that delivers an endless stream of information. And yet, despite unlimited access to the most powerful information retrieval system ever created, we spend much of our time engaging with fluff at best and disinformation at worst.

We evolved to forage for information in naturalistic settings, exploring our physical environment and interacting with groups of at most a few hundred people. Our habits and heuristics work well in those settings. But today we forage in complex digital spaces, connected to networks comprising millions of people and guided by some of the most elaborate technologies ever developed.

Moreover, we forage today in an adversarial arena. The online spaces where we spend our time have been constructed to exploit our evolved psychology. The Web runs on advertising dollars, so platforms compete fiercely for our attention. To win this contest, information technology companies draw upon a vast wealth of behavioral data compiled from our use of their websites. It would take extraordinary optimism to expect that our evolved modes of information foraging will continue to function well in this new synthetic environment.