Three Ways to Get Information on the Internet: Roaming, Subscribing, Searching

A few weeks ago I turned off notifications for almost every app on my phone. Over the following week, using various apps, they kept reminding me to turn notifications back on so I wouldn’t miss important information. I ignored them, and I don’t seem to have missed anything important. In this so-called information age, we receive more information every day than an emperor did in ancient times, but how much of it we actually need is highly doubtful. You think you are swimming in an ocean of information; in fact your attention, and your so-called idle time, are simply being harvested. The internet is a powerful tool, and using it well requires being strong yourself; otherwise you easily become the tool’s slave. This post sorts out three ways of getting information on the internet: roaming, subscribing, and searching.

1 Roaming

Roaming here means, to some degree, wandering the internet with no clear purpose. It is the internet’s biggest disruption to how we get information, and also its biggest double-edged sword. Since hyperlinks appeared, information has become easy to connect and infinitely extensible. Traditional information organization was mostly linear or tree-shaped; the internet’s is networked. That brings many benefits:

1. A network can model any complex structure, so it offers a truer way to represent the structure of information — Wikipedia’s structural advantage over a traditional encyclopedia, for example;
2. The boundary between the inside and outside of a piece of information blurs; “references” are easier to reach, and building a topic page on the internet is far easier than in traditional media;
3. It offers unlimited possibility of running into surprises: while roaming you may find things you never knew, strike sparks of ideas, and break out of information silos and your own cognitive barriers.

But the flaws of this mode are obvious too:

1. Too much time gets eaten by junk information; many people who produce information have ulterior motives, and clickbait of every kind is peeking at your attention at every hour;
2. What you get is scattered and unsystematic; internet information is still mostly free and, compared with books, still relatively low in quality;
3. Roaming easily comes with restlessness and so-called information overload: inspirational articles replace resolve, knowing about replaces understanding, awareness replaces knowledge.

For roaming to do its job well, what you most need is strength of your own — values, critical thinking — so that you can keep absorbing nutrients from the ocean of information instead of being drowned by it.

2 Subscribing

Subscription was the main way traditional media interacted with people before the internet, and as the internet developed it became one of the internet’s ways of getting information too. Most information providers want users to subscribe and build a long-term relationship, because that is how they profit; the form may be following, push notifications, and so on. WeChat official accounts, even Moments, are a retrograde reaction against information roaming — WeChat official account articles even deliberately keep share links unstable, trying to build their own little ecosystem. Subscriptions have many variants; the most avant-garde is the recommendation mechanism brought by machine learning, which is essentially a subscription based on individual interest. Retrograde or avant-garde, subscription has its advantages:

1. Subscription is a filtering mechanism: it concentrates attention on the people and things you actually care about, or lets you filter information by following people you trust;
2. Subscription takes readily to paid mechanisms, enabling high-quality knowledge services that keep information quality high while iterating fast.

But subscription brings risks too:

1. Cliquishness: whether you filter for yourself or a machine filters for you, in the end you hear and see only what you are willing to hear and see. Mistaking what you like for the truth about the world is a big risk;
2. Behind apparently active subscription there is a great deal of passivity. People tend to defend their own choices; once you are someone’s fan you may gloss over his mistakes, and if you have put money in, you will hold to your original choice even harder.

3 Searching

Searching is a required skill for academic research, and I think it is also a required skill for any modern person living in the internet age. The search engine is the greatest invention on the internet after the hyperlink. Through searching, a person getting information can truly treat the internet as a tool:

1. Convenient search makes holding isolated facts nearly worthless — questions like “how wide are China’s railway tracks?” on a television quiz show — so entering a new field becomes easy;
2. Searching is strongly purposeful, which gives “information for my use” a good starting point; you no longer browse for two hours and then cannot recall what you read;
3. Searching usually solves the problem right away, as long as you are not the first unlucky person to hit it.

For searching to work, beyond improving your basic search skills, what matters most is your own level of scholarship. Otherwise you fall into the trap of substituting search for thought, satisfied with the information this external brain hands you, unable to synthesize it and come up with ideas of your own.

4 Putting them together

I split out three modes in order to clarify the concepts; real situations are usually a combination of all three. Say I follow a programmer on Sina Weibo (subscribing); he mentions an interesting new programming language and gives a link, so I click over to take a look (roaming), find it is genuinely good, then Google the language’s homepage and a lot of other material (searching), and study it for an hour straight. But it could also be: I follow a programmer on Sina Weibo (subscribing); he shares a funny video, I click over to take a look (roaming), and one video leads to another, and an hour later I have no idea what I have been doing.

Each of these ways of getting information has its advantages; the key is to use them “consciously,” keeping your brain aware of its own state at all times. Even in the freest roaming state, you should set a time limit, otherwise countless attention black holes will kill your time and leave you with no idea how.

The internet is a powerful tool, and it will even steamroll the weak. If you do not keep improving your judgment and analysis, you will only have your attention harvested over and over, be brainwashed over and over, and feel that the world is full of perfectly sensible sayings — and still not live this life well.