The Paradox of Choice and a Social Internet

To maximize happiness, we maximize autonomy. To maximize

autonomy, we maximize freedom. To maximize freedom, we must then

maximize choice. So goes one of the most ingrained, unquestioned beliefs of

Western culture, argues Barry Schwartz in The Paradox of Choice.

We have become so obsessed with this principle that our current

culture is all about customization. Schwartz uses the example of putting

together a salad – he finds hundreds upon hundreds of salad dressings at his

local grocery store. He argues, then, that instead of choice leading to

freedom, then autonomy, then happiness, it instead leads directly to

paralysis. We fear making the wrong decision and often go out of our way to

avoid making any decision at all.

This idea begs to be applied to the Internet. As Schwartz explains,

“virtually all of the research on choice overload done thus far has been in

connection with consumer goods,” not the “domain of information” (6). The

internet has become our main – and often, only – resource for practically

every researched decision we make. Still, “putting all the world’s

information in front of people may solve one problem, but it creates another”

(Schwartz 6). There are billions upon billions of websites online – so much

information that we must ask if there is too much choice.

The first thing to do is to ask Google. Type in “is there too much

choice?” and you will get 133,000,000 results1. With that many answers, I

1
Note: this number may vary
vote yes. There is too much choice.

There is so much choice that the number of web pages on the internet

can’t even be counted. And yet, a billion people (1 in 6 worldwide!) use the

internet every day. For something that, according to the paradox of choice,

should be enormously overwhelming and even “paralyzing” (Schwartz 2), the

internet is certainly flourishing. Does the paradox of choice really just not

apply when brought into the context of the internet? And perhaps most

importantly, how do users decide what web pages to visit?

I propose that the web has become a primarily social tool and that this

new social aspect effectively shields us from the overwhelming choices of

the internet and drives our viewing decisions. So in order to

comprehensively explore the social paradigm, I begin by presenting the

model of traditional information consumption on the web. Then, I can

directly cover Schwartz's analysis of the Paradox of Choice applied to finding

content online. In order to resolve the Paradox of Choice, the theory of

memetics is introduced as a new model of how information spreads. All this

will reflect a shift from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, a shift that I will show is

characterized by a transition from search to social. That is, users get their

information from their friends (via social networks such as Facebook and

Twitter) rather than by searching for it themselves. Ultimately, this

transition must be viewed in the context of a greater shift towards a more

socialized experience and the question must be asked as to what this implies

for happiness in the future.

The Paradox of the Internet

The internet, at its most basic level, is a massive web of data and

information. The internet user, you or I, finds data and consumes it. For

example, if I want to know what is happening today, I go to a news site to

find data and then consume it by reading it. For the remainder of this paper,

we bracket out the other technical or geographical complexities of the

internet and use this simplistic model in order to focus on the way

information spreads. Information is intentionally left vague here; it is

important to this paper to view everything (music, videos, text, pictures,

conversations) for what it is – merely a collection of data packets that are

created, discovered, and consumed.

Consuming information we are good at. We have done it for centuries.

We read newspapers and books, we talk to other people and listen to

lectures, we observe the world around us and we conduct experiments.

Consuming information on the internet is just another permutation.

Discovering information we have a harder time with, and with billions

and billions of options to search for online, this is by far the biggest usability

problem with the internet. In order to get a better idea about how users

really decide what web pages to visit, consider the internet search space.

This is an industry that has been largely dominated by Google with

about 80% market share (comScore). Google became the leading search

provider by introducing a new search algorithm, PageRank, to provide its

users with more relevant information. Yet even the name itself (Googol

refers to the number 10100, a 1 followed by 100 zeros) is a reflection of the

immenseness of the web.

This is an area of such importance that Schwartz did his own study

entitled “When More is Less: The Paradox of Choice in Search Engine Use.”

He showed users a search scenario and a query and then given 30 seconds

to choose the best result item. Schwartz expects that when users are shown

24 results rather than 6 results, users go through an initial phase where their

expectations are increased by extra options followed shortly by paralysis

when they have to entertain all the different alternatives. “Dissatisfaction”

and “regret” result because with more results users feel like there was a

better option.

It is clear that internet users and others in the industry find this

problematic when we look at the software giant Microsoft’s ad campaigns for

their search engine, Bing. Bing is a much newer search engine that is

starting to gain traction – it will be powering all of Yahoo!’s search by 2010.

Yet it is not marketed as a search engine, but rather as “the first ever

decision engine.” Bing’s ads ask, “Are you suffering from search overload?”

in a direct shot at Google, the world’s preferred search engine. They tell us,

“Stop searching. Start deciding.”

This highlights a general shift away from the original model of the

internet. Although we are used to searching for the website we wanted to

visit or for the information we wanted to know, there is now too much to sift
through – we can’t make these decisions on our own. Thus a new field

arises, dubbed “choice architecture” by Thaler and Sunstein in Nudge. The

essential question, then, is “how do people make decisions about what

information to consume on the internet?”

The Internet Meme

At this point, it is necessary to introduce the concept of the meme in order to

discuss information flow online. The term “meme” was coined by Richard

Dawkins in The Selfish Gene when he applied Universal Darwinism to ideas.

He believes that ideas evolve and reproduce by a process just like natural

selection. The stronger ideas spread like a virus from person to person while

the weaker ideas die out. By calling memes “selfish genes,” which want to

spread and reproduce and avoid dying out, Dawkins proposes that these

memes have lives of their own, merely using humans as replication

mechanisms -- “Meme Machines” (Blackmore 1). Traditionally, memes are

spread by imitation (the word meme is derived from mimeme, which is greek

for to be imitated) – tunes, ideas, and catch-phrases are common memes.

When someone makes up a new word and all her friends start imitating it,

and the word spreads, it might be called a successful meme, for instance.

The internet adds a new dimension to the spread of memes – it allows

them to replicate in different ways and at increasingly larger scales. Susan

Blackmore, author of The Meme Machine, coins the term “teme” to refer to a

technological meme, a new type of replicator that does not need direct
human action in order to reproduce (“Memes and Temes”).

So now, when we ask why memes are copied, the internet adds a

completely new dimension. If memes are, by definition, the viral ideas that

propagate through society – the websites we visit, the videos we watch, and

the articles we read – then they also speak directly to the paradox of choice

on the internet. They offer a new explanation of why we “decide” to do what

we do online.

I put “decide” in quotes here because under Blackmore’s theory of

memes, we are merely vessels for ideas to replicate. “Imagine a world full of

brains and more memes than can possibly find homes,” she says in her 2008

TED Talk, explaining how memes selfishly replicate if they can (“Memes and

Temes”). Our understanding of “decision,” then, would just be a way of

giving us a façade of control.

As such, it can be argued that memes effectively dispose of the

internet’s paradox of choice. The information we consume is a direct result

of which memes replicate. And while this does away with the very hard

problem of uncovering our means of “choosing” information online, it raises

problems of its own – problems that may be just as difficult to solve.

In particular, having explained why certain information spreads, we

must next investigate just how memes, or under Blackmore’s terminology,

temes, propagate by means of the social internet.

From Web 1.0 to 2.0, From Search to Social

The definition of Web 2.0 is very loose – definitions range from the use of

AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) to the start of user-generated

content to the rise of ecommerce – but a common trademark is the

prevalence of social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, and

Twitter.

Today, social networks such as Facebook – which plays host to over

300 million users, each of whom has 120 friends on average – have emerged

as the best way to transport ideas across the world (Leskovec). But

Facebook is not this successful because of the community it provides.

Rather, Facebook's success can almost be single handedly be attributed to

the May 24, 2007 launch of Facebook as a platform -- the addition of third

party Facebook applications that allowed other developers to access

Facebook's massive social graph. B.J. Fogg, a Stanford University researcher

on the persuasive abilities of technology, makes this quite clear: “In the 16

weeks following the Platform launch, Facebook added over 18 million new

members. At the end of 2007, Facebook had well over 50 million users,

doubling the 24 million they had in late May.”

Other social networks began opening up their APIs (Application

Programming Interfaces) for third party developers, leading Fogg to declare

the viral spreading of content through people's social graphs, which he calls

Mass Interpersonal Persuasion, “mainstream.” And all of this led up to the

Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, where Sean Parker, a manging partner at

Founder’s Fund and one of the original founders of Napster, give a telling talk
claiming that “network services” such as Twitter and Facebook are replacing

“information services” such as Google as the dominant web presences.

Indeed, it would seem that most millennials -- the generation that grew up

around the start of the new millenium and whose lives are most integrated

with the internet – visit their e-mail, Facebook, and a few other sites almost

exclusively, never even encountering a list of 100 million web sites as on

Google. Any content they view is linked from these social sites, making it

unnecessary to ever have to choose from the complete offerings of the web,

and shielding them from the Paradox of Choice. As a result, Digg.com,

TweetMeme.com, and other web-based services have cropped up for the

sole purpose of aggregating content socially. For example, StumbleUpon

gives you recommendations for which sites to view and which articles to

read based on what other people with similar interests to you have liked.

Searching for information yourself is being replaced by having the

information come to you, almost always from other people.

Parker says that the shift from search to social is occurring because

collecting data is less valuable than connecting people, but there is an

alternate explanation here that he does not explore. The packets of

information that reach us are memes, and memes are not sought out via

search engines, but instead they find us by replicating through social

networks (Leskovec).

In the early days of the web (and the days predating the web), there

was a few-to-many paradigm -- a few people would broadcast information

online, or on TV, or in the newspaper, and the general public would consume

it. This is how memes would spread. Now, notes new media expert Clay

Shirky in his book Here Comes Everybody, “Everyone is a media outlet.”

Now anyone can push content to the world – via YouTube, Facebook,

personal blogs, or a variety of online services that encourage user-generated

content -- a phenomenon that Shirky terms “mass amateurization.”

When the internet's billion users are not only consuming content but

also contributing it, it really turns into the ultimate meme machine. This is

not a novel concept. But when we think of everything we consume as a

meme rather than a webpage that we found, the natural selection of memes

and temes sheds much light on the internet’s Paradox of Choice.

Remember that memes are “selfish genes” that want to replicate, with

the “fittest” surviving. Add in that since everyone is now generating content

and pushing it to their friends, memes will replicate through social networks.

The paradox of choice stated that we become paralyzed when we have too

much information and need to make a choice. Then, it makes sense that

Web 2.0 conquers this paradox by letting memes filter themselves out.

People no longer have to find information themselves, they just wait for it to

come to them. The content that I consume is then necessarily the “fittest” of

the memes – it reached me by replicating through my Facebook friends and

the Twitter feeds I follow. It certainly is at least a little frightening that

everything you consume is chosen not by you, but rather by your friends

(this is often called “crowdsourcing”). But it is still not that simple.

Implications of a Social Web

If a socially-oriented web successfully avoids the information overload

that the paradox of choice suggests, then our life is made easier as far as

consuming content is concerned, but we now have to worry about producing

content as well. Not only is everyone a consumer, but if “everyone is a

media outlet,” as Shirky contests, there is a new dimension to worry about.

Guardian columnist Paul Carr, in a very controversial 2009 article for

the Silicon Valley blog, TechCrunch, argued that we have become too

obsessed with our role as “citizen journalists” -- that we have experiences

not for the sake of having the experiences, but rather just to share the

experiences. And he thinks it goes even further than that:

In truth the desire is far more cynical: to ensure that the world knows

that we were there when something dramatic happened. I was on the

scene, I was somewhere you weren’t – and I have the photos and

tweets and videos to prove it. Check out my YouTube account; follow

me on Twitter. LOOK AT ME, LOOKING AT THIS.

He cites the first reports of the Ft. Hood shootings – Twitter reports – where

someone (in his mind, disrespectfully), tweeted out the picture of a wounded

soldier. He questions whether a juror who is tweeting an entire trial will be

more likely to give a “guilty” verdict because his followers will be more

interested. He warns that we might become so obsessed that when we see

an accident, our first impulse will not be to help or call 911, but to take a
picture and tweet it. Another blog titled Analysis from the Bottom Up

contests that “Our reality is less interesting than the story I will tell.”

Every reader will have a different opinion on Carr's claims (look

through the comments on TechCrunch for a sample), and I don't want to

argue one side or the other. The point is that whether or not we descend to

the level that Carr cautions of, we may not be entirely prepared for the

transition from being primarily a consumer of information to primarily a

producer. Countless times, I have seen people go hiking in the mountains or

go to a football game just to take pictures to post on Facebook.

Researcher Jim Stolze calls the internet a Global Campfire (Virtual

Happiness Project), a place where online communities create virtual

happiness. The sharing of your experiences with your friends may very well

be what brings you the most pleasure in life – more pleasure than the actual

experience itself. But we have to realize that it was not always like this.

Experiences were once for experiencing -- “consuming”, if you will – not just

for sharing. If you do choose to make the shift from consumer to producer, it

is a shift that must be made consciously. The technology will be there – it

will keep becoming increasingly real-time and increasingly social – but will

using it make you happier?

Works Cited

Blackmore, Susan J. Meme machine. Oxford [England]: Oxford UP, 1999.

Print.
Susan, Blackmore. "Memes and Temes". TED. 12/6/09

<http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/susan_blackmore_on_memes_and_

temes.html>.

"comScore Releases October 2009 U.S. Search Engine Rankings". ComScore.

12/6/09

<http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2009/11/com

Score_Releases_October_2009_U.S._Search_Engine_Rankings>.

Fogg, BJ. "Mass Interpersonal Persuasion: An Early View of a New

Phenomenon." Third International Conference on Persuasive

Technology, Persuasive 2008. Berlin: Springer. Print.

Leskovec, J., Adamic, L. A., and Huberman, B. A. 2007. The dynamics of viral

marketing. ACM Trans. Web, 1, 1, Article 5 (May 2007), 39 pages.

Mollman, Steve. "Can happiness be found online?" CNN. Digitalbiz, 19 Feb.

2009. Web. 15 Oct. 2009.

Parker, Sean. "The New Era of the Network Service." Speech. Web 2.0

Summit. CA, San Francisco. 22 Oct. 2009. Scribd. TechCrunch, 23 Oct.

2009. Web. 30 Oct. 2009.

Schwartz, Barry, Antti Oulasvirta, and Janne Hukkinen. "When More Is Less:

The Paradox of Choice in Search Engine Use." SIGIR '09, July 19-23,

2009, Boston, Massachussetts, USA. Print.

Shirky, Clay. "Everyone is a media outlet." Here Comes Everybody The

Power of Organizing Without Organizations. New York: Penguin HC,

The, 2008. Print.

Thaler, R. H., & Sunstein, C. R. (2008). Nudge: Improving Decisions About

Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New Haven: Yale University Press.