The Price of Civilization_ Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity - Jeffrey D. Sachs [64]
Each day we are discovering new risks to privacy and to Web-empowered marketing, which is not surprising given the fact that some businesses will cross any line in the quest for profit. The latest development is a host of companies that create detailed dossiers on Web users, including their names, demographic information, addresses, financial information, buying patterns, social networks, political affiliations, and much more. This information is collected by way of small computer codes, “cookies” or “Web bugs,” that the firms secretly insert into personal computers when certain websites are visited or enabled, thereby allowing the firms to monitor the Internet use of the individuals and, in a Web-based network with cooperating firms, to piece together highly detailed and intrusive data sets about millions of individuals. These data sets are then sold commercially or to political campaigns and parties. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, one of these companies, RapLeaf, had “indexed more than 600 million unique email addresses … and was adding more at a rate of 35 million per month.”15
The evidence regarding the Internet and our psyches is even harsher. For a public already spinning from relentless TV, DVDs, movies on demand, MP3 players, and ever-smarter phones, the Internet seems to be rewiring not only our social networks but our neural networks as well. The latest concern of neuroscientists is that Internet browsing may undermine our long-term concentration in favor of our short-term responsiveness to stimuli. We don’t read on the Internet so much as we scan the screen. Surfing is different from reading, both emotionally and cognitively. We can retrieve facts much faster, but we retain them for less time.
Psychologists and sociologists will no doubt increase their focus on our sensory overload in general. Studies of information transmission in our digital age show the remarkable increase in overall information flows per person but don’t yet reveal the consequences to our mental well-being and still less for our society. A remarkable study by the Global Information Industry Center documents the startling increases in information flows and the changes in composition as well.16 In 2009, the average American consumed “information” for around 11.4 hours per day, up from 7.4 hours per day in 1980 and no doubt still less in earlier years. These information flows come in a remarkable range of delivery systems: television (including network, satellite, cable, DVD, mobile, and other), print (books, magazines, and newspapers), radio, telephones (fixed and mobile), movies, recorded music, and computers (including games, handheld devices, Internet, e-mail, and offline programs).
The study measured the flow of information in three ways: by hours spent receiving the information, by number of words transmitted, and by number of gigabytes of information transmitted. The last puts a premium on video and computer games. The information per American for 2009, in total and as shares of the respective categories, is shown in Table 8.2. Notice that TV still dominates in terms of hours spent (4.91 per day) and words received (44,850 per day). TV is second in terms of gigabytes behind video games. I say “still” because of the evidence that TV use is now apparently declining among younger people in favor of other forms of information flows such as computers, mobile phones, and e-readers. Electronic screens are ubiquitous and in round-the-clock use, but now in a widening array of devices.
Table 8.2: The Daily Flow of Information, 2009
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