So imagine that you had your smartphone minituarized
and hooked up directly to your brain.
If you had this sort of brain chip,
you'd be able to upload and download to the Internet at the speed of thought.
Accessing social media or Wikipedia would be a lot like --
well, from the inside at least --
like consulting your own memory.
It would be as easy and as intimate as thinking.
But would it make it easier for you to know what's true?
Just because a way of accessing information is faster
doesn't mean it's more reliable of course,
and it doesn't mean that we would all interpret it the same way.
It doesn't mean that you would be any better at evaluating it,
in fact you might even we worse
because, you know, more data, less time for evaluation.
Something like this is already happening to us right now.
We already carry a world of information around in our pockets,
but it seems as if the more information that we share and access online,
the more difficult it can be
for us to tell the difference between what's real and what's fake.
It's as if we know more but understand less.
Now, it's a feature of modern like,
I supposed,
that large swaths of the public live in isolated information bubbles.
We're polarized not just over values but over the facts,
and one reason for that
is that the data analytics that drive the Internet
get us not just more information but more of the information that we want.
Our online life is personalized,
everything from the ads we read
to the news that comes down our Facebook feed
is tailored to satisfy our preferences.
And so while we get more information,
a lot of that information ends up reflecting ourselves
as much as it does reality.
It ends up,
I suppose,
inflating our bubbles rather than bursting them.
And so maybe it's not surprise
that we're in a situation --
a paradoxical situation --
thinking that we know so much more
and yet not agreeing on what it is we know.