Condensing The Iceberg

Attention, addiction, and the crucial art of withholding information in an era of data abundance.

In 1971, the Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon delivered a now-famous lecture at a colloquium at Johns Hopkins. Titled “Designing Organizations For An Information-Rich World,” the talk is largely credited with introducing the concept of an “attention economy,” though Simon never actually used that phrase in his remarks. I’m not sure I’d ever read the original lecture in full, though I have probably seen it cited dozens of times over the years. But reading Chris Hayes’ engaging new book on the attention economy, The Sirens’ Call, sent me back to find the original transcript of the Simon lecture, which turns out to have all sorts of subtleties to it that I had not properly registered.

Simon’s most famous line is this: "In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients.” But there was another quote from Simon that Hayes surfaced that caught my eye:

What makes a given information processing system useful to an organization isn’t how much information it generates or even the raw amount of information it can process. Rather, [Simon argues], “the crucial question is how much information it will allow to be withheld from the attention of other parts of the system… To be an attention conserver for an organization, an information-processing system must be an information condenser.”

The whole idea of an “information condenser” struck a chord with me, because I’d just had a conversation with my friend Rebecca Skloot—author of the classic The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks—about the research and writing workflow involved in writing nonfiction history; borrowing a metaphor from Hemingway, she’d described the research process as being like constructing this giant iceberg of information, where you know in the end only a small bit of the entire complex will be above the surface, visible to the reader.

This was not the first time I’d discussed this issue with Rebecca. Years ago I interviewed her for a Medium series on the writer’s workflow in a piece I called “Rebecca Skloot has too much information.” It included this incredible picture of her midway through the process of researching Immortal Life:

So much of what I do as a writer comes down to figuring out the most clever and accessible way of condensing an iceberg of source material into a much smaller format. In this case, I’m condensing a book by Chris Hayes, a conversation with a Rebecca, a lecture by Herbert Simon, and, as we will see, a Saturday Night Live sketch—all into a Substack post that you can read on the subway. In the case of one of Rebecca’s books, it’s condensing ten years of research and thinking—hundreds of newspaper articles, scientific papers, diary entries, interviews, notes—into a compelling three-hundred-page narrative. What is worth saving in that enormous pile? What tiny sample of it best represents the whole? A huge percentage of my thinking time as a writer is spent answering questions like those.

That all sounds laudable enough, but the problem is—and here we get to the central argument of Hayes’ new book—there’s another modern invention beyond “nonfiction authors” that also provides this compression service: your phone.

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If I had to guess the distribution of the average modern human’s information interests I would say it was something like: they want top-level news about the world, pop culture, sports, maybe politics, with the ability to zoom in if something momentous happens; and fine-grained real-time news from their family, friends, and work colleagues. That’s the ideal tip of the iceberg. But of course the total amount of information generated by all those domains is enormous: trillions of bits of information every second. Every medium compresses that information in different ways. MSNBC gives you world news and politics, but has absolutely no idea what is going on with your friends and family. The team Slack channel at work gives you a different slice.

Now imagine some kind of metric like how closely does this medium match the information compression needs of its audience? That seems like an honorable enough mission, even considering that humans often have bad judgement about what information would most benefit them. But my suspicion is if you actually tried to do the user research on that question, you’d find that there was one clear winner: the smartphone. The phone—conveying social media in all its forms, text messages, Slack channels, Twitter—gives us that “average human” package of information more effectively than any communications medium before it.

I sometimes feel like this property is underplayed in accounts of how the smartphone is transforming our culture. The phone is not just capturing our attention because “surveillance capitalism” has manipulated our judgment. Our phones are addictive because they’re interesting. They’re addictive because they do a good job of condensing the iceberg.

In The Sirens’ Call Hayes presents that addictive force—the command the phone has over our attention—as one of the defining properties of our era. He begins with this lovely concatenation of two traditional meanings of the word ‘siren':

The ambulance siren can be a nuisance in a loud, crowded city streetscape, but at least it compels our attention for a socially useful purpose. The Sirens of Greek myth compel our attention to speed our own death. What Odysseus was doing with the wax and the mast was actively trying to manage his own attention. As dramatic as that Homeric passage is, it’s also, for us in the attention age, almost mundane. Because to live at this moment in the world, both online and off, is to find oneself endlessly wriggling on the mast, fighting for control of our very being against the ceaseless siren calls of the people and devices and corporations and malevolent actors trying to trap it.

Hayes’ book is extremely stimulating, in the best way; even in sections where I felt like I had done a lot of thinking on the subject matter already, he consistently produces some novel twist or new way of framing the issue that had not occurred to me before. He has an amazing section where he walks through the distinction between “grabbing” and “holding” attention that should be required reading in every media studies class. One example of this in my own experience: my biggest complaint about Twitter under Musk is not the prominence of right-wing content, but rather the increased emphasis on TikTok-style short video content, which tends to “grab” my attention for the simple reason that moving images attract the eye more than text. Because those videos usually have little to do with my range of interests, I find that Twitter performs worse as an information condenser than it did pre-Musk.

But even with that downgrade, the combination of Twitter and text messages does an admirably good job of presenting me with a quick overview of what I need to know at any given moment in time: breaking news and commentary from both the public and private sphere. This is why I tend to find it a little grating when critics compare the social media platforms to, say, the cigarette companies, claiming that they’ve “manipulated the algorithm” to give us an addictive dopamine hit. (Hayes, to his credit, doesn’t generally take it this far.) One of dopamine’s key roles is to alert your brain to surprising developments, situations where the outcomes deviate from your predictions, where something novel appears to be happening. Dopamine effectively converts novelty and surprise into interest and attention. Drugs like nicotine or caffeine make things more interesting by creating artificial supply of dopamine molecules in your brain. But social media does it by supplying actually interesting things. Yes, most of these companies have advertising-based models that compel them to devise ever more elaborate mechanisms to capture your attention. But the core principle behind almost every social media algorithm—”condense the iceberg by showing me things that my friends liked”—is not merely a device to show you more ads. It’s actually a useful initial filter.

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But like everything that changes the way we pay attention to things, that filter turned out to have some unexpected costs. One of those costs is that it gets harder to dive beneath the fast-running surface waters of the newsfeed. The ideal information compressor lets you skim and plunge, to slightly modify an old concept from David Gelernter. Twitter in its heyday had a hint of this: tweets themselves were only 140 characters, but they often carried links to 5,000-word New Yorker essays, or entire books. But there’s no use denying that it gets harder and harder to build up the cognitive muscles you need to read and understand extended linear text if you live in the newsfeed 24/7. I feel it myself, and I have been an avid book reader all my life. Hayes is very good on this condition:

You hear complaints about the gap between what we want to pay attention to and what we do end up paying attention to all the time in the attention age. Someone ambitiously brings three new novels on vacation and then comes back having read only a third of one of them because she was sucked into scrolling through Instagram. Reading is a particular focus of these complaints, I find. Everyone, including myself, complains they can’t read long books anymore. We have a sense that our preferences haven’t changed—I still like to read—just our behavior. And the reason our behavior has changed is because someone has taken something from us. Someone has subtly, insidiously coerced us.

All of which raises the inevitable question: how do we correct for this? One potential solution is designing new platforms that encourage you to explore information at different depths, and make it easy for you to get out of “the shallows,” as Nicholas Carr once called it, platforms that allow you to both skim and dive deeper.

This is, no surprise, one of the guiding principles behind what we’ve tried to do with NotebookLM. Upload a complex mix of source material and Notebook will do its best to help navigate your attention to the most important sections. A major quality for us is “interestingness”: given this particular iceberg of sources, what are the most interesting facts or ideas that we can expose at the surface. (One of the internal slogans for the Audio Overviews team is “make anything interesting.”) How you actually do that is that trick, of course. You can make something sound interesting with a clickbait headline, or you can do it by making it relevant to the audience, or by transforming it into a compelling narrative, and so on. A few weeks ago, Saturday Night Live ran a hilarious skit implicitly poking fun at Audio Overviews, the gist of which was that we were trying (unsuccessfully) to make school interesting by turning the classroom subject matter into a slang-heavy conversation between two Gen-Z hosts with a whole personal backstory to keep the kids hooked on the lesson:

This is obviously not what we are doing with Audio Overviews (though I have to say it was pretty cool to be sufficiently part of the zeitgeist to be parodied on SNL, in a skit featuring Timothée Chalamet no less.) But the general pattern that Herbert Simon described of taking a large quantity of information and withholding most of it from the user’s attention—and translating the remaining bits into some new format (in this case, a podcast-style conversation)—is very much part of our mission. You can get a high-level view of your sources almost instantly inside of NotebookLM — whether in audio form, or in the form of a text-based FAQ or Briefing Doc. But those options for skimming information are always accompanied by an invitation to plunge, because the sources are also reproduced in their entirety in the app, and our citation system is constantly referring you back to the original material. And unlike traditional books, you can always invoke the AI to help you understand a difficult concept, or translate it into more accessible language. You can hang out on the tip of the iceberg, or you can dive below the surface to inspect the whole thing.

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[One quick postscript: my routine writing this piece is actually a great example of how NotebookLM makes it easy to dive beneath the shallows. I’d found two versions of Simon’s lecture online: a typewritten manuscript with many handwritten notes and edits, and the final text of the speech he delivered at Hopkins. I was curious about how the lecture had changed over time in Simon’s mind, and so I asked Notebook to itemize the most significant changes that Simon introduced with his edits, and in a followup query, to speculate on any motivations or shared patterns behind those changes. Trying to evaluate that myself would have taken at least an hour of painfully reading through the pages, deciphering Simon’s handwriting, and taking notes on each transformation. Notebook generated its analysis in ten seconds, with citations throughout allowing me to jump directly to any unusually provocative edits mentioned.

This is the kind of situation where I feel like the condensing skills of a tool like NotebookLM actually deepens my understanding of the material. Obviously I would get a more nuanced comprehension of the Simon lecture if I took the time to review all his handwritten edits manually, and in fact, were I writing a long essay or a biography exclusively about Simon, I would no doubt have gone through the trouble of doing that. But for a post like this where Simon’s lecture is only a part of what I’m discussing—and where it’s unclear whether there will be any insights uncovered in reviewing his changes—I probably wouldn’t have bothered to investigate the edit history at all. But it’s so easy to get that quick answer to the question “what did Simon change in this draft” that I end up taking that additional step now. And remember, this is all working with an image-only PDF, no OCR whatsoever. As I’ve said many times recently, no computer in the world could perform that task just 18 months ago. And now I barely even blink when I get a response like this one.]