Nerve Nets And Fake News: A Note From Nautilus' Michael Segal
We at Nautilus were delighted to see our name appear, earlier this month, on a list of media sites with the greatest number of Digg appearances over the last three years. We were 28th, just ahead of the 144-year-old Popular Science and just behind the 127-year-old Wall Street Journal. This, despite the fact that Nautilus is just over three years old, and didn't exist at all for the first nine months of the tally.
The article put it this way: "Amidst the titans of old media, we find insurgents like Pacific Standard, Nautilus, Aeon and Atlas Obscura." Nice — who doesn't want to be an insurgent? The list provided a snapshot of new media taking advantage of lowered barriers to entry, courtesy of the internet. This encourages new voices and perspectives, and evolves our national and international conversations. All good.
But that lowered barrier to entry has its costs. Buzzfeed reported last month that the tiny Macedonian town of Veles has launched over 100 US politics websites, and produced fake news stories with social media reach rivaling anything from those same titans of old media on the Digg list. Some say it affected the presidential election. So are we happy with our newly open media landscape, or not?
We like analogies at Nautilus, and there's a ready-made one here: Many have compared the internet to an evolving central nervous system for humanity. Before there were synapses carrying electrical signals, there was chemical signaling, like the type that sponges perform with calcium. It's slow and limits the scope of organisms' interactions with their environment and each other. If we buy the analogy here, we can call that the pre-internet era. Scrolls, handwritten letters, that sort of thing.
Further up on the evolutionary timeline are diffuse nerve nets, spread evenly around the body, without any distinction between central and peripheral systems. There are synapses, neurons and clusters of neurons called ganglia. Messages get around quickly but there is relatively little structure. Here's the interesting bit: Animals with nerve nets can respond quickly to the environment, but have trouble detecting the source of stimuli. Their response doesn't depend on the point of contact, or the kind of thing they're encountering. Reminds you of how fake news gets spread.
It's not clear when the highly structured, directed and redundant central nervous systems we see in humans and other advanced species evolved, but it seems likely to have been many millions of years. Our digital nervous system is just a few decades old. Smartphones, which represent over a third of our internet-connected time, are turning ten in 2017. It's very early days, still. We have reason to be patient – and optimistic.
In the meantime, all of us here at Nautilus are looking forward to celebrating our fourth birthday this April. On the scale of new magazines, that's an epoch.
