Each and every one of us is awash in a tidal wave of information. No one person living today can absorb more than an incredibly tiny fraction of it, even by those considered by society to be well read and highly knowledgeable. The basic reasons we find ourselves treading water in this ocean of data is firstly an ever expanding population – more people produce more information; and secondly the ever increasing percentage of people who can read and write. The more who can read and write, the more there is to read and write.
Continued from yesterday’s blog…
But things aren’t perhaps quite as bad as they seem. A massive amount of information is of only short-term value. Advertising is a case in point. Who now cares about ads for Model-T Fords from a century ago except perhaps a rare historian or automobile buff? Ads for real estate now long sold aren’t much interest. Old TV and radio jingles have at best nostalgic value; probably not even that to most people. And what about that weather forecast from 48 hours ago, forecasting the weather now 24 hours past. Well, who cares anymore – unless you’re doing an analysis of how frequently they get it wrong; which most of us acknowledge but hardly keep detailed records of. How many of us consult a telephone directory that’s more than a year out of date? Do 99.9% of us give a damn about what 99.9% of us Twitter? Paraphrasing Churchill; ‘Never have so many said so much about so little!’ – Tweet, tweet.
Even if we read a tweet, it usually goes in one eyeball and out the other hardly pausing long enough to resister. So thank goodness for short term memory. Although it’s a bit of information from your life, do you really need to remember what you had for dinner 147 days ago? And thus your wetware’s storage processes those information needs accordingly.
Then there are the near duplications of many a common topic. I mean there’s got to be, on say the topic of how to quit smoking, several dozen books; thousands of articles, and probably tens of thousands of hits you’ll get on any Internet search engine, all saying pretty much the same thing. And does the world really need another cookbook to go with the literally million or so already published not to mention the billions of recipes that have appeared in all manner of magazines, mainly magazines directed at female readers – its overkill cubed. Hasn’t every variation on every basic recipe been done to death? I don’t own so much as a single cookbook yet I’ve had no problem feeding myself for decades now.
Speaking of cooking, does the world really need yet another dieting (how to lose weight without really trying) tome? The amount of advice about loosing weight, if all converted to A-4 sheets of paper covered with small print, would easily reach from here to the Moon, yet the entire essence of dieting can be boiled down to just one sentence. “To lose weight, consume fewer calories than you expend.” However, given the rate of obesity in the developed countries that keeps on keeping on and increasing to boot, all that diet advice has fallen on deaf ears, and fat ears at that.
And if you’ve read one romance novel, you’ve pretty much read them all. And isn’t the market really supersaturated with books about (fill in the blank yourself)? If you see one ad in the newspaper one day, and the same ad in a magazine the next, well you haven’t really received any new additional information you need to mentally process. All you’ve accomplished is the waste of another second or two realizing that.
And while “sex” might be the most popular search term plugged into Internet search engines, well there really are just a limited number of variations on the theme.
I recall the incident at work when my supervisor directed me to prepare a one page summary about asbestos. I found and printed off over a dozen identical summaries or ‘fact sheets’ about asbestos in actually way less time than it would have taken me to do one up from scratch. That didn’t move the boss one bit; I still had to add yet one more summary sheet on asbestos to the world’s collection of same! That was actually the straw that broke this camels’ back for I told him to stick his idiocy up an unmentionable place where the sun never shines and retired (which fortunately I was in a position to do).
Then too nearly all of the information produced probably has very little, if any, impact on your day-to-day life. If the Hadron Large Collider finds the Higgs Boson, it’s of interest to only several thousand theoretical physicists. Local politics halfway around the world has no bearing on your own council rates. A civil war in a remote African location, unless you’re personally there and involved, maybe of passing interest, even humanitarian concern, but for most of us that has only residual short term memory within our brain thingy. If there are say, one million units of information in the world, but only one unit has any relevance or interest to you, then maybe things are manageable. But, if one thousand units are of potential interest, yet your mental storage capacity, never mind your time available to absorb those one thousand units simply isn’t physically possible, then you’re suffering from information overload.
However, on a more positive note, information can serve as a fashion statement of sorts. It’s desirable to compress information into realms that don’t take up much space – like microfiche, hard disc drives; CD-R’s; iPods, eBooks and flash drives. It’s also important to be able to retrieve information quickly, and modern electronic storage and retrieval technology certainly assists. Google certainly has its advantages.
But on a more personal perspective, my own home is lined with thousands of books; several tens-of-thousands of CDs, and a few thousand DVDs. The thought of moving house and taking all of those with me is a nightmare I really don’t want to think about. However, I’ve not taken any move to transfer any of this collection to a more electronic and space-saving format(s). Why?
There’s something about having all those books, CDs, DVDs, even magazines on open display. They are as much a part of your furnishings as your choice in room wallpaper or paint job; what you hang on your wall; your knickknacks; what kind of car you drive; or what you have growing in your garden. They are an integral part of what makes you, you. Its part of the show-and-tell that makes up and defines your personality; your interests; your likes and dislikes; helps define why you are unique amongst every human who has ever lived or is alive today.
Looking at a computer or an iPad tells me nothing about what the computer or iPad’s owner’s interests are. Looking at their bookshelf crammed to the brink with books, CDs and DVDs tells me volumes about the owner.
Lastly, when the hard disc crashes; the power goes out; well the low-tech book keeps on keeping on. And you can’t swat a cockroach or prop up a wobbly table with your laptop! Books and other printed media are really one of history’s established long-lasting technologies; I think books (and other physical but non-print media as well) will be around for a long time to come yet, even if there are more books available to read than we have time to read them; more CDs available to listen to than we have time to hear them; more DVDs available than we have time to watch them all.
And yes, finally, I do realise that this very piece adds to the problem rather than to the solution, but then again, if you can’t beat them, join them!
Conclusion: Information overload is going to get worse before it gets better. Actually, until such time as we can evolve, bioengineer or genetically engineer a better brain thingy, there will be no improvement. Somehow we’ve got to match in parallel the exponential information increases with equivalent storage capacity in our wetware. Having the ability to search various electronic media for what we want, while extremely useful, isn’t quite the same as being able to draw off on and retrieve that same material from within our own software – our wetware.
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