Dan Gillmor on going from macro to micro, useful aggregators, and the best tactics and tools

“We need to go outside of our personal comfort zones in all kinds of ways politically, socially, culturally, to have a better understanding of the information ecosystem that we’re engaged in. “

– Dan Gillmor

About Dan Gillmor

Dan Gillmor has been a media pioneer for decades. He is currently a professor at Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. His latest project is News Co/Lab an experimental lab aimed at collaboration to improve the information ecosystem. He is the author of several excellent books including the highly influential We The Media. He has an online course hosted by edX called Overcoming Information Overload.  Website: dangillmor.com

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Book Series

• We The People
• Mediactive

What you will learn

• Why getting better information starts with upgrading yourself (03:09)
• Why we should look for sources of information outside our comfort zone (05:27)
• How deploying the best current tactics and tools help to deal with the overflow (08:02)
• What repetition tells you about a story (10:35)
• Why you should not depend on a single technology (14:09)
• How to use categories of worth (17:03)
• Why pay attention to articles that elicit a response from you (20:30)
• Why information overload is still more pros than cons (23:14)
• Retain healthy scepticism, not cynicism (27:19)
• Help the people you care about understand things that are difficult (30:31)

Episode Resources

• Overcoming Information Overload edX Course
• News Co/Lab
• Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication
• Kabul, Afghanistan
• BBC
• The New York Times
• The Guardian
• The Wall Street Journal
• The Washington Post
• Pinboard
• QAnon

Transcript

Ross Dawson: Dan, it’s a delight to have you on the show.

Dan Gillmor: Thanks for having me.

Ross: So information overload is a special topic of yours, as you’ve taught it amongst other things.

Dan: Yeah it’s something I’ve been looking at for quite a long time. It stems from recognizing that media is democratized, the technology is democratized, so that it’s in everyone’s hands, that everyone can participate in public conversations, as well as private ones, and one result of that is a massive amount of information, and we have to sort it out.

Ross: Absolutely. We can look at it as a systemic problem, as in, there are certain things which we could, and maybe should, do to address it in terms of a systemic problem, but ultimately it comes down to us as individuals, we have to deal with the reality of this profusion of information, correct, incorrect, spurious and relevant.

Dan: Yes, we do. We need to get the help of players in the ecosystem that are powerful, and that could help us a great deal.

Ross: Just for a moment on that, who are the players? And what can we do?

Dan: My philosophy on all this is that we need better information, no doubt about that. When I think of that, I think, in part, in the journalistic sphere, that we need a lot better journalism than we have, and trustworthy sources of information. That’s a supply-side question. While we do need to upgrade supply, what you’re getting at is that we need to upgrade demand. I believe, and my work has been focused on upgrading demand at scale, which is to say, we need to improve us, we need to upgrade ourselves.
Scale requires help from major institutions in our societies, starting with the education that is at all levels, continuing on to media, which brings scale to information; journalism, entertainment should be playing a role, advertising, public relations, and others should be part of the bringing upgraded demand scale. Then finally, the institutions that pretty much define scale in the modern world, the technology, media companies, which need to do a lot more than they have been doing to help us be better ourselves as individuals and in our communities.

Ross: Absolutely agreed. I do want to get to what you do, personally, as an exemplar of this. You mentioned education. I think education is, of course, lifelong. This is not just throughout our formal schooling, and it has always befuddled me why they never teach us to deal with information since that’s basically most of what we do through our lives. What would you say, at any level of education are the things that we need to be learning to be better at using the information that we have.

Dan: I think it falls in two areas. One is principles, which really don’t change much, things of basic common sense, but which we need to restate periodically, so we’re clear. One is that we need to be skeptical of everything, but not equally skeptical. Use judgment to find things that we have reason to trust more than not. I think it’s a mistake to trust anything 100%, but there are many things I trust implicitly, and I trust them, even more, when they make mistakes, because they correct them, and tell me they made mistakes.
Then we need to ask questions, which people don’t do very often, which they should do. No, we can’t expect people to go re-report the BBC report from Kabul, Afghanistan, but we can, especially when it’s locally based, ask our own questions and get good answers, or at least useful ones. We need to go outside of our personal comfort zones in all kinds of ways politically, socially, culturally, to have a better understanding of the ecosystem that we’re engaged in. Then we need to understand how media work, not just technically, but how media are used to persuade, and in fact, manipulate. All of those are basic principles.
Then there are tactics, which do change because the tools change, the technologies change. We need to deploy the best current tactics and tools to help deal with this overflow, and the fact that so much of what we encounter is either mistaken, not out of any malign intent, or disinformation, misinformation, out of definitely malign intent.

Ross: To illustrate that can we get a sense of your practices and what you do? Do you have any information routine? Do you go to particular sources at particular times of the day? How do you define your purpose and what you’re looking to get from information? Do you have some kind of structure for how you take on the information around you?

Dan: I don’t think I have a connect the dots and paint in the numbers routine. It’s important for anyone listening to this to recognize that I live in this world of information. I’m not typical. I’m constantly swimming in this ocean. Most people have a life, and they don’t have time to do the stuff that I do. I have to separate the fact that I’m part of this and engaged in it in a very deep way, from what I think other people do and have time to do. But having said that, I can answer your question in several ways. First, is that I have a bunch of news websites that I visit every day because I think there’s value in a curated collection of information from editors, whom I think are more likely to have a good sense of the world than not.
Again, I emphasize that they don’t get it right all the time. I am in constant despair, in fact, over the bad journalism I see. However, I still go to those places, New York Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, BBC, and a number of others, to just get a sense of what the top editors in journalism think at the moment. I have a bunch of Twitter lists that I’ve collected of people who are experts in specific areas, and whom I trust to flag stuff that I’m going to be interested in, just by nature of who they are, what they do, so I can scan that. I often see a lot of repetition and that’s a good hint that something’s important if I see the same thing flagged three or four times.
I go from a macro level to the very micro level of the Facebook group for my small town in Northern California; it’s the only thing around where resembling news happens about that place. It’s moderated very well by somebody who has basically banned national politics unless there’s a direct connection to that town, which is the best thing you can imagine because people w