Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll.

These days there are a lot of people who are worried about filter bubbles, right? Living

in your own little bubble, only getting the sort of information that confirms your views

about the world. And we've read about how to break out of our filter bubbles, etc. But

if you think about it, the amount of information that is out there to be consumed by a typical

person with access to a computer and the internet is literally overwhelming. It is far

more than anyone person can possibly fairly look at. We're all going to choose to pay attention

to certain things and not to pay attention to other things. So there's always a kind of bubble

in the sense that you can't literally follow everything, right? It turns out that manipulating

these bubbles, manipulating the way in which we choose not just what political side we pay attention

to. But the general question of what information we pay attention to overall is critically important

for figuring out how people work and believe and act in the modern world. Today's guest

is Zaynep Tufcchi, who has become quite celebrated these days for saying a lot of wise and

smart and correct things about the pandemic and about social media and things like that.

She calls what she does, techno sociology. And as she points out right here in the podcast,

it's really just sociology, but technology is just so overwhelming these days, you have

to pay attention to it. Zaynep started thinking about things like protests and revolution

operations, the Arab Spring and the use of information technologies like people in

Tariya Square were organizing over Facebook and Twitter. It turns out that the government's

response to this is of course the first move is to censor, right? To try to shut off the

information. But because there is so much information out there, that's just in practicals. It's

too easy to get information. What you can do instead is flood the zone. You can sort of put out

...