Over at Apt. 11D, in an April 8 post Laura describes her strate­gies for cop­ing with infor­ma­tion over­load, and quotes Paglia and oth­ers on “kids these days.” Her inspi­ra­tion, in turn, comes from an inter­view with David Shenk, author of Data Smog (visit Ama­zon via her associate’s link, please). Shenk’s book is just one of the cur­rent crop of works in many media regard­ing Infor­ma­tion Over­load as a neg­a­tive thing.

As I’ve men­tioned before, I’m a lit­tle skep­ti­cal of the “infor­ma­tion over­load” trope of mod­ern com­men­tary. On a cou­ple of fronts.

First, this sense of inun­da­tion seems always to be cast as an intrin­sic change in us (whether it’s our indi­vid­ual psy­ches or the cul­ture or what is unclear). In any case, as a biol­o­gist and ama­teur anthro­pol­ogy geek, I have to doubt (a) that we are wit­ness­ing unprece­dented large-​​scale changes now, and in fact that (b) peo­ple or cul­tures can so fun­da­men­tally change at all. Note that I’m not say­ing that change doesn’t hap­pen — just that I don’t think the direc­tion of change is towards more knowl­edge. I’ll tell you where I think it’s headed in a bit.

I can’t bring myself to believe that our fore­fa­thers were stu­pider or had less capac­ity, or that they failed to use what capac­ity they had to know and learn and remem­ber stuff. I sus­pect my great-​​grandmother knew a lot more than I do about the peo­ple who lived in her neigh­bor­hood (a Slo­vak moun­tain vil­lage or a Welsh min­ing town, depend­ing on the great-​​grandmother involved), about the local geog­ra­phy and peo­ple and folk­lore and reli­gion, and so forth. Far more than I know about my neigh­bors. Heck, after seven years of liv­ing here, I just learned the sur­name of my neigh­bor across the street for the first time yesterday.

Instead, I know a num­ber of peo­ple out­side my vil­lage and val­ley, and reg­u­larly cor­re­spond with folks scat­tered over five con­ti­nents. Know a lot more about biol­ogy and mol­e­c­u­lar engi­neer­ing and Java pro­gram­ming and such, and far less about bug­gies and milk­ing a cow and which local gen­try to watch out for in a dark alley.

I have an odd feel­ing that the same com­plaints of “not hav­ing enough time or energy to keep up” arose when this whole writ­ing thing began, and when books stopped being chained to shelves in libraries, and when the reading-​​silently-​​to-​​yourself thing became pop­u­lar, and when news­pa­pers and tele­phony spread, and so forth. In other words, some­body has felt the right to com­plain that “there’s too much to know these days” more or less steadily through­out history.

The Paglia para­graph Laura invokes strikes me as very sim­i­lar (styl­is­ti­cally and in terms of atti­tude) to a para­graph I read in an essay in the Unpop­u­lar Review of 1914 (per­haps Cosma, who now owns the book, can con­firm this). Or per­haps it was in an 1896 Harpers or Scrib­n­ers from the late 19^th Century.

It’s so hard to keep track of what they’re writ­ing in the mag­a­zines these days. Well, what they were writ­ing back in those days.

My point is: the sense of dis­rup­tion does not arise from a mat­ter of increas­ing quan­tity. While Laura (and I) have cho­sen for per­sonal rea­sons of pref­er­ence not to pay atten­tion to con­tem­po­rary pop­u­lar things like Amer­i­can Idol and Fou­cault (and much of Paglia, in my case), the cul­ture as a whole has also led us to give short shrift to bug­gies and black­smiths and how to eke out a liv­ing from a kitchen gar­den patch and mid­wifery &c &c

The inter­est­ing thing, to me, is that the main dif­fer­ence caused by tech­nol­ogy — books, mag­a­zines and such in addi­tion to blogs and email — is a realign­ment of geo­graph­i­cal and tem­po­ral bound­aries to per­sonal knowl­edge. Laura writes that on one day when she did her com­pre­hen­sive exams, she had her head full of the works of Marx. But he’s a dead fel­low, who lived an insur­mount­able dis­tance away. Later today I will have to put aside my head full of aim­less social con­jec­ture and restock with a load of machine learn­ing tech­niques and the R pro­gram­ming lan­guage for sta­tis­tics. Later on, I’ll prob­a­bly have to work out how to cook a chunk of pork roast given the sparse selec­tion of stuff in our pantry, and per­haps in the evening will spend a few more pleas­ant hours lis­ten­ing to Jim Dale read­ing Harry Pot­ter and the Order of the Phoenix, which will require my mind to focus on what it recalls about the demen­tors, the impli­ca­tions of Albus Dumbledore’s brother, and that froggy lady (we’re not very far into the book yet, but hear­ing it read skill­fully aloud is the only way to go).

That’s a lot of stuff regard­ing peo­ple I never met, writ­ten by peo­ple I never will meet, in places I will never visit, con­cern­ing things — espe­cially in the case of machine learn­ing algo­rithms and demen­tors — that I will never actu­ally expe­ri­ence in my phys­i­cal sen­so­rium. Well, OK, the pork is here, some­where. But the herbs are from that big com­pany in Bal­ti­more, and the gar­lic is not gar­lic I grew myself, and I sure don’t know how to light my stove — it just does it.

All this shuf­fling around will cause me lit­tle or no pain, as it turns out. Indeed, for me it can be a heady experience.

The incor­rect thought I’m try­ing to cor­rect is this: The dif­fi­culty and incon­ve­nience and pres­sure peo­ple per­ceive about “mod­ern life” does not come from increas­ing demands on their men­tal capac­ity. They’re not “get­ting full.” Their dis­com­fort comes from lack of preparedness.

Think about it. I know gen­er­ally that I’m headed for a wild ride through the world. I’ve braced myself. While I argue that every­body liv­ing in every cul­ture has more or less the same sized stock­pile of infor­ma­tion in their heads, in my head there is a body of knowl­edge that acts as a suit­able buffer or fil­ter or “padding” to the tran­si­tions I make. In the head of, say, my Mom — who was born in the Depres­sion era and enjoys tele­vi­sion and reads a book or two a day — there is no infra­struc­ture for cop­ing with “inter­ac­tive media”, and so inter­ac­tion with the worlds of mod­ern gam­ing, email or the Web leaves her feel­ing stressed.

My Mom’s stress is not from pres­sure of need­ing to know more than she can, it’s from acquir­ing knowl­edge out­side her men­tal schema. Not “cul­ture” or “future shock” as such, but the sub­tler rel­a­tive of that feel­ing we all expe­ri­ence every day. Laura feels it when she is exposed to Amer­i­can Idol (as do I and Bar­bara and Cosma and many of my friends and col­leagues), but I cope with that stress by hid­ing the tele­vi­sion in a back room, and not hav­ing a full cable sub­scrip­tion. My immi­grant Slo­vak grand­par­ents prob­a­bly felt a good deal of it when they took the long boat ride, but they coped by liv­ing in com­mu­ni­ties of their friends and rel­a­tives when they arrived in Cleve­land. My fun­da­men­tal­ist rel­a­tives prob­a­bly feel a good deal of it when they hear what hap­pens on Angel, but they cope by going out of their way to avoid such “worldly” things.

But while there are per­sonal and cul­tural defenses against the dis­com­fort we feel at out-​​of-​​schema expe­ri­ences and knowl­edge, there are also per­sonal and cul­tural dri­ves which lead folks to seek out these jar­ring expe­ri­ences — things like travel, heresy, amuse­ment parks, libraries, folk art. And some others.

If we feel over­whelmed by all this “new infor­ma­tion”, why is it that we keep cre­at­ing it?

[Updated a cou­ple of cross-​​links and trans­ferred from archives, 4÷22÷07]