Why do we open our mouths?

Out of necessity. There’s such a deluge of cultural content, we cannot parse it on our own. In the 1980s, researchers began talking about the “information-load paradigm,” which refers to the saturation limit after which people can’t absorb more information. This was a new conceit in the eighties—a response to the maelstrom of material suddenly being produced. Today we can likewise talk about our “culture-load.” There are only so many songs, books, movies, memes we can take in and form opinions on before the culture-load buries us under a mountain of must-reads and essential videos.

Thus squashed, we encounter what psychologist Barry Schwartz calls the paradox of choice. We thought that more options would produce more freedom, and thus more happiness (215 soda options = American Dream). But the reality of such splendorous choice is quite different. In fact, according to Schwartz, the flood of choices that a screen age citizen faces “produces paralysis rather than liberation.” 

Consider, for example, the art and music and literature being shared online in the one minute it takes you to read this paragraph: 72 hours of YouTube video will be uploaded; 5.5 million Snapchat videos will be viewed; and 216,000 photos will go up on Instagram. Simply glance at the streaming content of a single minute, all of which you missed while you were focused on these sentences, and your gut tightens—you’ve already fallen grievously behind. You cast about for something—anything—to make sense of all these scraps of art and heritage and supposed beauty. But the Tower of Babel has become a City of Babel. We race desperately from door to door.

Mostly, I’ve been happy to let wayfinding systems like his guide me through Babel City. What book should I read? Easy: Amazon purchasing patterns have (for the moment) led to the promotion of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. And which songs would make the best soundtrack for my run? Nothing simpler: I type “running playlist” into the YouTube app and click one that half a million others found useful. But the more I think about the aggregating forces in my life, the more I wonder how they shape my ideas about what is worthwhile and what should be ignored. Where is my own taste? And just how easy is it for a crowd to change a person’s mind?

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