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 19th 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]