A few days ago I joined a dinner with a highly educated crowd: several doctoral advisors, including two lead scientists on national research projects. As usual, people started trading gossip to loosen up the atmosphere. Before long the conversation landed on one of the hottest stories making the rounds: the claim that China’s territory had increased by 1,045 square kilometers. The mood at the table instantly turned excited.
But as each person added what they had heard, it became obvious that nearly all of it came from self-media accounts. After listening all the way around, I still hadn’t heard anything new, so I kept quiet.
The story had caught my attention as soon as it appeared. It cited the release of the 2023 edition of the national map by the Ministry of Natural Resources. But in the screenshots being circulated, there was nothing at all about an increase in national land area; that part existed entirely in the retelling. So I looked up the relevant notices on the ministry’s official website. There was no mention of any territorial change.
Still not satisfied, I checked the website of the Central People’s Government of the People’s Republic of China. On the homepage, the country’s land area was still listed as 9.6 million square kilometers. Following the logic of the self-media posts, the claim was that the new map had revised the border line compared with the old version, and that this was where the extra area came from. That was easy enough to test. I had previously downloaded the 2016 version of China’s map from the standard map website run under the Ministry of Natural Resources, so I went back, downloaded the 2023 version, and compared the two. The boundary line had not changed.
Based on the materials I could verify, the claim that the new map updated China’s territory by 1,045 square kilometers was simply false.
After the territory story, the table moved on to Japan’s discharge of nuclear-contaminated wastewater and the seafood issue. The conversation had the same unmistakable self-media flavor. After everyone had taken turns condemning Japan, someone raised a question that was actually worth thinking about: why had this news suddenly stopped dominating the conversation?
Once the blame had been pushed onto the United States, someone remarked that China exports far more seafood than Japan does, and that the economic damage from the wastewater issue could end up being greater for China than for Japan. From there the discussion shifted to a practical question: would seafood be safe to eat again in two or three years?
Again, the answers sounded like the internet repeating itself. The half-life of radioactive contamination varies enormously depending on the element involved, ranging from more than a decade to hundreds of millions of years. In other words, the effect after two or three years would not be fundamentally different from the effect now. What is much more likely to fade is not the contamination, but the public memory of the event. In two or three years, attention to the wastewater issue may have decayed to almost nothing, and then seafood will somehow be considered acceptable again.
The conversation ended with a burst of pride over the supposed foresight of raising seafood in Xinjiang. To me, that was simply the mirror image of panic-buying salt during the nuclear contamination scare.
What surprised me was not ignorance, but uniformity
Everyone has limits to their knowledge. Outside their own area of understanding, highly educated people are no different from anyone else. No one knows everything, and no one should be expected to. That part is ordinary.
What surprised me was something else: everyone at the table had received roughly the same self-media information at roughly the same time. Even when that information had glaring gaps and obvious flaws, once everyone accepted it and began repeating it, it effectively became truth within that small circle.
The people at the table came from different provinces. Their information channels could not possibly have been identical. Yet they had still absorbed nearly identical versions of the same stories. That gave me a new understanding of what an information cocoon really is.
An age of abundance that produces sameness
In an era overflowing with information, you would expect abundance to mean variety. People should be receiving more differentiated, more diverse inputs than ever before.
The reality often looks like the opposite. Information is highly homogenized. The internet is crowded with shallow rewrites and improvised embellishments built around whatever topic happens to be trending. Because trending stories usually have very short life cycles, few people have any incentive to investigate them seriously.
That creates an uncomfortable question: can an individual completely avoid being carried along by junk information?
I doubt it.
Very few people are good at judging whether information is true. Even fewer are willing to spend the time and effort required to check. Then the next question follows naturally: if we can’t avoid all bad information, can we at least reduce how much of it we consume?
That is hard too. If people are honest with themselves, how many can really resist opening self-media platforms in their free time? It doesn’t matter whether the reason is entertainment, stress relief, curiosity, or learning. The result is often the same.
Are books any safer?
It is tempting to say that if self-media is unreliable, then books must be better. But books now suffer from some of the same problems as online media: there are too many of them, and abundance makes selection harder, not easier.
So how do people decide what to read? Usually in one of two ways: they search online, or they look at ratings and reviews. Neither method guarantees quality.
Books that are heavily recommended online may simply be the ones most frequently reposted by content editors and media accounts. Books with the highest praise may just be the smoothest, most comforting works of motivational prose. High visibility and high ratings only show that a book has attracted attention. They do not prove that the content is strong.
It took me the last couple of years to really understand this. Many highly praised books have a long list of interchangeable substitutes. After reading two books from the same category, you can often guess what the rest are saying just by scanning the table of contents. Grand language, after enough repetition, turns into something as thin as plain boiled water. Yet people encountering it for the first time may treat it as gospel, proudly dropping a few of its phrases now and then. Once enough people repeat the same lines, others assume the material must be good.
The cocoon is not caused by too much information
Even classics, whether Confucian texts or religious scriptures, can become powerful cocoons when they wall people off from the vast range of new knowledge outside them.
So is the information cocoon a result of information overload?
Not really.
Its real cause is much simpler: someone else has taken control of how your information is filtered. It may be an algorithm, an expert, an opinion leader, the crowd, or power itself. The form changes, but the mechanism does not.
That is why blind faith in any authority makes people less knowledgeable, not more.