In this talk to a community of lifelong learners, I explore how information overload, declining local news, and diminished civic participation interact — and why journalism’s challenge is increasingly a demand-side problem rather than a supply-side one. Drawing on research from neuroscience, media studies, and democratic theory, I argue that curiosity is a civic resource, and that journalism functions best as an institution that channels and sustains collective curiosity.
The presentation reflects my effort to develop a clearer framework for understanding information ecosystems, civic engagement, and community resilience — themes I hope to deepen during a Knight-Wallace Fellowship by engaging more rigorously with social science research and policy perspectives.
Hi, I’m Reid Williams, and as Toni just mentioned I help lead NowKalamazoo. I know some of you are familiar with that. I know some of you are strong supporters of NowKalamazoo. But even those folks might not be aware of The Local Journalism Foundation.
The Local Journalism Foundation is the incorporated nonprofit entity that operates NowKalamazoo, and we also are establishing programs working in concert with NowKalamazoo. I’m not going to talk at length about that – I don’t want to “steal my own thunder” and I’m teaching an OLLI course next week that will have a lot more to say about that.
For today, it’s just helpful to know that these organizations are dedicated to local news and information here in Kalamazoo County.
So I’d like to jump right into my talk today.
I recently came across a data point that I’ve been looking for an opportunity to start a presentation with, so here it is:
In a paper published in 2012, scientists used a variety of methods to estimate the average person’s brain is processing about 34 gigabytes of information every day.
That’s a lot of reading, watching, listening and all forms of processing. As a statistic, though, for me, it’s a bit empty. I have trouble comprehending just how big 34 gigabytes is, even if I start comparing it to the memory in my laptop or storage space on a flash drive. I can’t eyeball a gigabyte the way I can a tablespoon of milk.
I’d like you to ask the person next to you if they know how big 34 gigabytes is. If you haven’t yet introduced yourself to the people sitting nearby, say hello and ask them to hold up their hands or convert it to pounds and ounces or to Fahrenheit or … something. Let’s see what we come up with.
Does anyone know?
Please go ahead and discuss for a moment with the people around you.
Do we have any good answers? You can shout them out: How big is 34 gigabytes?
See what I mean? I think we all know that the deluge of information a person in modern society is exposed to is huge, and it’s hard for us to gauge just how massive this amount of daily information is.
So what struck me about the journal I saw this in, it said that 5 centuries ago, that’s about how much information a highly educated adult would have been exposed to over their lifetime.
We’re getting the same lifetime diet of information daily. And more every year they said.
So that made the phrase “information overload” very real to me, and I think it’s an apt description of the world we live in.
Even if it were all the highest-quality, most enjoyable information, that’s a lot. This world of information overload requires something of us if we don’t want to get crushed by it. I believe what it requires is curiosity.
The pace of change (technology, politics, everything) can overwhelm us — but curiosity and community learning (like OLLI and good local journalism) are antidotes.
All of you here are to be commended for your curiosity. Honestly, please give yourselves a round of applause.
And the OLLI instructors among you need to be thanked for encouraging that curiosity. Let’s give them some appreciation by applause.
You all have been learning about radiology and astronomy. History and artificial intelligence. The arts, and the art of aging. I look through the OLLI catalog each semester and I am tickled and amazed to see the breadth of topics on offer, not to mention learning about the experts among us who teach these courses.
The reasons you all joined OLLI are the same reasons we established The Local Journalism Foundation. There are shared values behind those reasons.
Journalism institutionalizes curiosity. This is extremely important for a community. Even in good times, members of a community have information challenges. My co-founders and I at The Local Journalism Foundation felt that these information challenges were becoming acute. Our information challenges have become a pain point.
The information challenges around us – many of which should be easily solvable – are increasing, and there has been an increasing amount of bad information making these challenges worse.
My co-founders and I were seeing (and experiencing ourselves) information challenges that we should be able to address. But there has been something growing (or something failing) that goes beyond an information deficit.
Curiosity can become a civic act, if we let it. It leads us to clubs and societies where we support each other in pursuing knowledge and betterment. This grows fellowship along the way. We grow collective expertise and resilience.
So as much or more than we’re concerned about this absence of quality information, my colleagues at The Local Journalism Foundation and I are concerned about this connectivity that grows among members of a curious community.
This idea is at the heart of The Local Journalism Foundation and NowKalamazoo. This idea of curiosity fueling cohesion is central to our vision and our mission.
I think you all here understand this implicitly. This crowd here is as curious as it gets. And that’s why I like you so much.
Curious people are open to being changed. They’re up for the possibility that they could be surprised, that their pre-existing ideas could be blown up, that they could see the world in a new way.
They welcome this because – once we get past the surprise – this new perspective brings new power and energy. Learning gives us super-powers.
I’m going to confess to you that I’ve stuck with journalism all this time because it has allowed me to indulge my curiosity for a living.
We didn’t start NowKalmazoo just for curious people, though. We started The Local Journalism Foundation to help grow and channel civic curiosity.
We created the Local Journalism Foundation because we know in our hearts – with a good helping of scientific evidence to support it – that a local information ecosystem is an essential element to a community’s well-being. Just like “information overload” is a real thing, there is a circulatory system to our community where the stocks and flows are news and information.
We know that we have to tend to this information ecosystem just like we do with sidewalks, roads and bridges, and the quality of our air and water. If we don’t work to improve it, if we fail to protect it and keep it healthy, all the things that rely on it – which is, I’m here to tell you, basically everything – will suffer and decline.
But there’s another important ingredient to a vibrant community beyond the supply and quality of information, and that’s civic engagement. Learning collectively, as we do here with OLLI, is just one form of civic engagement.
We could study all these topics I see in the OLLI catalog by ourselves. The library is full of books on all these topics. We could check them out and read them at home.
You might have heard of a little website called YouTube – it’s full of videos that can teach you about pretty much every topic there is. We could try to learn all these interesting things from the comfort of our couches. But we don’t.
If you ask me, this is the very essence of our country. There are a lot of strong opinions about the founding of our country and the meaning baked into that, the motivations and beliefs of the founders behind it. But if you ask me, those words right at the beginning, in the first line of the Preamble to the Constitution, “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union …”
They knew it wasn’t perfect. They were stipulating that it was, in fact, just the beginning of a perpetual improvement. They provided a blueprint for how we might collectively learn and continue improving.
And here’s a reason I see a lot of our collective action running into obstacles or even getting derailed.
There’s a kind of certainty that is the enemy of improvement, and certainty can become stubbornness or worse. On the contrary, there’s a humility that comes with inquisitiveness. As I said before, curious people are open to having their minds changed, they know that any disruption that comes through learning is probably going to be worth it in the end.
Democracy requires question-asking citizens, not just opinion-holding voters.
Journalism, at its best, complements this curiosity: It is there to ask “Who benefits? Who decides? What’s the evidence?” Its roles include facilitating the collective curiosity, as well as memorializing it and recording what we learn.
Since 2005, though, America has lost more than 2,900 newspapers — about one every week. This amounts to about a third of the newspapers that existed across the country just two decades ago, now gone.
What we’re seeing is this negative feedback cycle that is the consequence of all these factors swirling together: our lack of local news, our diminished appreciation for collective learning, a waning of trust.
And unfortunately, what researchers have been able to document is that communities without strong local news see lower civic participation and higher polarization. (Pew and Knight Foundation data support this.)
If we let it, this decline can really put us at risk.
Two years ago, a tornado devastated the city of Portage and other areas of Kalamazoo County. Some of our neighbors there are still dealing with this today. Recovery has not completely finished.
I’m not going to tell you that local news would make miracles happen, but I do believe that our response to this catastrophic event, our community reaction and recovery, would have been better if we had the information ecosystem we need and deserve.
Abundant, free-flowing, high-quality information can without a doubt get help quickly to where it’s needed most. It allows people to take action with confidence.
That’s the thing about this “age of unknowing” – somehow we have at the same time information overload and less confidence as a result of it.
I do have a positive message here, though, so don’t let me diminish your optimism. I think we need to focus on what’s possible.
What’s possible when we exercise our curiosity, when we come together to learn and build community, is that we develop a powerful civic imagination.
“Civic imagination” is our ability to picture ourselves as part of a shared ‘we’ — to imagine a common future even when we don’t agree on everything. It’s our collective cognitive capacity to evaluate different ways of organizing ourselves as a society, the ability to entertain changing ourselves and our neighborhood, and to consider whether our personal fortunes might improve along with everyone else’s.
If a local newspaper disappears, so do the local memories. The story of who we are gets replaced by the story of what’s algorithmically trending on Silicon Valley’s social media.
And that’s not just a journalism problem. It’s a community memory problem — a story problem. If we forget who we are, how do we imagine what we could become?
In a basement in an otherwise normal-looking house in the Edison Neighborhood – maybe even right at this moment – there are people training at boxing. It’s a gym known as ChampsDen, run by a Kalamazoo resident named Ja Green.
NowKalamazoo published a story and some photos of Ja and his trainees earlier this summer, and I think about it all the time. You might drive or walk by on this street, and you’d never know that down there in the basement there are people pushing themselves, working to better themselves and each other.
Local journalism, at its best, gives us a mirror — not just of our problems, but of our possibilities. When we tell stories like this, it helps us see ourselves as a community with promise again.
And that’s what you do here, too. You learn together, you debate and explore limits and opportunities, and you stay curious. That’s civic imagination in action — you’re practicing democracy and growing community, one class at a time.
So I hope you’ll stay curious, and that you’ll stay curious together. I hope that you’ll bring more people into this community of learning, because I know it will only invigorate the community-at-large across this county. Because I can think of no more American thing to do.
Discussion