Information as an Environment

What makes some opinions more possible than others?

Where do your opinions come from?

Obviously, other people get their wrong opinions from somewhere else. But where do you get yours?

Most of us operate on an intuitive idea of how we form opinions. I’m going to name this the “Bakery Model” of opinions.

Facts go in, they mix with your intellectual capacity, your logic, and (if you’re feeling particularly self-reflective) your own set of values and emotional biases.

Out comes your fresh baked opinion loaf. Well risen and with a good crust. Not too sweet.

Other people’s opinions go wrong when they have bad facts, limited intellectual capacity, and use too many emotions instead of logic.

Then, good or bad, we all wait for the opinion loaf to sit long enough that it becomes nice and stale. Firm enough to bash against other people and (if you’re civically minded) the voting booth.

You’ve probably not thought about opinion formation in this way exactly, but that is more or less how our society seems to approach the issue. A one-way factory where facts meet the human, and the product is either correct or….less correct.

In this article, I’m just going to introduce you to a new way of thinking about how we take in information and how we use it to form our opinions. All of us - you, your neighbors, your coworkers, and even those people who vote wrong.

What if information acts more like an environment?

The term “information environment” was initially coined by sociologist Hubert J. O’Gorman back in 1986. He was trying to chase down what he called “pluralistic ignorance.” This is how academics describe when lots of people have the same bad opinion. O’Gorman pointed out that the public made judgment errors when they were inhabiting a bad “information environment.” Meaning, that it’s not that they were incapable of making a good judgment, they simply did not have the right information that would lead them to that good judgment.

I think this idea has been underutilized ever since because if we think of information not as an ingredient, but as an environment, we can better see the complex relationship it has with our lives.

Environments are varied. They can be lush, they can be arid, they can be monoculture, or they can be diverse. They sustain some animals and not others. And here is the key:

Every plant and creature of a given biome has a complex, branching relationship with every other plant and creature which makes this variability not just possible, but guaranteed.

If we think of information as an environment, a biome, then we can finally ask good questions about where our opinions come from. We can ask what kind of facts are present in a person’s information environment, and which ones are absent, or hard to find. Environments are self-contained systems; animals have a hard time moving from one to another. Similarly, your information environment is built from the tools and resources you have available to you and how much your daily life allows you to use them.

When we think of information as an environment, we can see opinions are like animals. They are products of their environment. They also co-construct their environment. Zebras cannot live without grass, and lions cannot live without zebras.

Information environments make some opinions more likely than others, and opinions make one more likely to encounter and understand some information over other information.

We have become used to the idea of a “food desert;” local regions where it is difficult or impossible to come across or purchase fresh and healthy food. What if we started using the term “information desert”? Are there places or lifestyles that make it difficult or impossible to access full, accurate information? What kind of resources and effort would someone in an information desert have to employ to get good information?

Or we could ponder the opposite side of this spectrum; do some of us navigate in an information jungle? Do we have the tools on hand to utilize that information in our best interest?

Here is my favorite result of thinking about information as an environment. It allows us to see how the act of forming opinions is not a simple matter of personal actions. We can see (and therefore investigate) where we are dependent on other people and on systems to feed good information into the biome. To provide us with tools to decode it. To allow us stages to act on it.

I’m going to use this concept throughout this year and show how we can (and have) applied this theory in the matter of media, the public, and politics. Some of these stories are, honestly, extremely funny.

For now, try to think about your information environment. What is in it? How healthy is it? And, most importantly, ask yourself “What’s missing completely?”