D A T A D E L U G E
In the informational jungle, picking your
guide is as important as keeping your head.
By the side of my bed sits a two-foot-high stack of unread newspapers. Its contents may shift, as some papers get read and removed and others get added, but it never vanishes, hard as I try to make headway against the newsprint tide. The stack first appeared when I was in college and has accompanied me ever since; it will probably not disappear until I do. So you could say I've been on intimate terms with "information overload" all my life. My bedside clutter embodies this concept, but it also does something more useful: It's a reminder that the seemingly novel phenomenon of "data glut" -- so readily and understandably linked to the rapid spread of computer networks -- in fact predates our love-affair with digital technology. As a society, we began mainlining information long before we'd ever heard of the Internet. And our most generous supplier remains the box in the corner of the living room, not the one sitting on top of the desk. Still, digital is hot in today's publishing market; you can't sell books unless you promote your idea as timely and on-the-edge; authors must coin catch phrases to grab media attention. Thus the irony at the heart of "Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut." This new book by David Shenk shapes its critique of our sound bite-ridden, buzzword-laden culture by tossing more sound bites and buzzwords onto the groaning heap. It fuels its attack on our "anecdotage" with anecdotes of its own. The book -- the second offering from the new HarperEdge imprint -- is built around 13 "Laws of Data Smog," including talk-show ready phrases like "All high-stim roads lead to Times Square," "Birds of a feather flock virtually together," and "Cyberspace is Republican." We are "informational gluttons" in danger of suffering "information obesity," Shenk tells us. And we'd better find the willpower or good sense to diet before we suffer an epidemic of "culturally induced Attention Deficit Disorder." Shenk's choice of title suggests his plan of repurposing environmentalist rhetoric to focus on "info-pollution" as the enemy -- whether it is the infonugget overkill of 24-hour news broadcasts, intrusive e-mail from spam-meisters or surgically precise niche marketing aimed in your face. Particularly in its weak final section of proposed remedies, "Data Smog" comes close to being a sort of "50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save Your Mind" brochure: "Give a hoot, don't info-pollute!" it chirps. Still, nearly all of what Shenk says about limiting information intake and "being your own filter and editor" is dead right -- and that counts for a lot. It may be obvious to point out that information rarely becomes more useful as it grows more copious, but today, with powerful forces indoctrinating us to the contrary, it's surely worth repeating. Despite "Data Smog's" penchant for the glib phrase, it's a valuable book, an initial survey of one of the major cultural battlegrounds of our time. If everyone who isn't yet online read "Data Smog" before joining America Online or getting Net access, their lives -- and the Net itself -- would have a much better shot at staying sane. Shenk has assembled the package of techno-skepticism more effectively than most of his predecessors. Clifford Stoll ("Silicon Snake Oil") had the understanding of digital culture, but not the organizational skill to write a coherent book; Sven Birkerts ("The Gutenberg Elegies") could write one elegant essay after another, but never bothered to acquaint himself with the new world of information he was denouncing. Shenk is just deeply enough immersed in the datasphere to criticize it intelligently, and yet his time online has not eroded his ability to tell a good story or present a case persuasively. Persuasively, but not, alas, brilliantly. Shenk sensibly promises in his introduction that "to avoid being part of the problem, this book aims for brevity and word economy." But his brevity is that of the pamphlet, not the poem. He hasn't found the kind of crystalline, penetrating conciseness that has always marked slender classics, from Samuel Johnson's "Rasselas" to Strunk and White's "The Elements of Style." He hasn't crossed the gulf from sound bite to aphorism. "Data Smog" outlines the issues but offers little in the way of analysis. Its historical context is thin, its spectrum of insights narrow, its bibliography surprisingly sparse (for instance, there's no sign Shenk has ever read Theodore Roszak's flawed but important "The Cult of Information"). One of Shenk's "laws of data smog" is "beware stories that dissolve all complexity." "Data Smog" itself skirts complexity rather than diving in. Information overload is, after all, a general phrase demanding further elaboration. Information can overload us in different ways beyond sheer volume -- the first factor that comes to mind when we think of "glut." The speed at which information comes at us matters, and affects our perception of volume. The form it takes -- text? sound? still image? moving image? -- shapes our sensory encounter with it. Its accuracy is critical: Too much inaccurate information mixed in with the truth can bury it, but when it comes to complex questions we're better off receiving conflicting information and being invited to judge for ourselves. Finally -- too often overlooked and perhaps most important -- we need to understand the intent behind each piece of information: Why is it being made available to us? Who provided it and why? Have we paid for it? Is it being paid for by someone else? Is there a political agenda or a marketing impulse behind it? Learning to ask systematic questions about information is the most important step in managing its overload. Unfortunately, we rarely hear systematic questions about online information. We don't yet have the necessary distance from the medium. Cyberspace is new -- not only new to most readers, but to most of the people writing about it as well. Although futurism is a '90s growth industry, the truth is that no one knows how today's "information glut" will change our lives, any more than the first million answering-machine users could know that this device for snagging phone messages would become a tool for screening calls -- or the first million television owners could foresee "Wheel of Fortune," "Star Trek" and the O.J. Simpson trial. For that very reason, the best way to understand the latest variety of "information overload" is to look at some of the best studies of TV's old, familiar kind. TV started reshaping our culture in the '50s but didn't get fully analyzed until the past decade-and-a-half. Essential works like Mark Crispin Miller's 1988 "Boxed In" outlined just how TV's all-pervasive irony preempted any effective rebuttal to its own vacuity. And thoughtful books like Bill McKibben's 1992 "The Age of Missing Information" bore witness to the precise geography of TV's infoscape, its marketing-driven substitution of an omnipresent "now" for all historical, social and spiritual context. One of the most unusual and rewarding books ever written about television shapes its title as a kind of paradoxical meditation on that word. New Yorker writer George W.S. Trow's 1981 "Within the Context of No Context" -- just reissued with a new introductory essay by the author -- is a unique collage of media criticism, sociological analysis and personal reminiscence. Though carefully organized, its format is a series of fragmentary paragraphs, like this thesis statement: "The work of television is to establish false contexts and to chronicle the unraveling of existing contexts; finally, to establish the context of no-context and to chronicle it." Trow's fundamental insight is that TV destroyed what he calls "the middle ground" of our public discourse -- the common-ground culture that shaped America's national life in the first part of this century, with its "booming voices" of confident authority. This left us with only two "grids" -- that of our intimate private lives and that of the mass-market demographics of broadcast TV's national audience. But the book deserves to be quoted, not paraphrased: Two grids remained. The grid of two hundred million and the grid of intimacy. Everything else fell into disuse. There was a national life -- a shimmer of a national life -- and intimate life. The distance between these two grids was very great. The distance was very frightening. People did not want to measure it. People began to lose a sense of what distance was and of what the usefulness of distance might be. "Within the Context of No Context" goes well beyond the conventional strategy used by authors like Shenk to inject catch-phrases like "information glut" into public debate. Instead, Trow digs carefully -- and with no small difficulty -- into the national psyche to expose the emotional roots of America's TV dependency. One reason he's able to find them is that he was born in the '40s; his life spans the decades of TV's ascendancy. We will perhaps not get a book about the Net with the same depth of insight until it can be written by someone who grew up with it. In the meantime, we have no choice but to think by analogy, and "Within the Context of No Context" is hugely and specifically valuable as a model. TV, according to Trow, replaced the old conception of history with a new kind of history driven purely by demographics, the science of marketing. "The most important moment in the history of television," he writes, "was the moment when a man named Richard Dawson, the 'host' of a program called 'Family Feud,' asked contestants to guess what a poll of a hundred people had guessed would be the height of the average American woman. Guess what they've guessed. Guess what they've guessed the average is." Because the Net comes at us via computer, it is positioned to take TV's crude, raw, mass demographics and transform them dynamically, interactively into the most powerful, convenient and potentially scary marketing medium ever imagined. Trow's arguments outline the questions we need to ask as that medium evolves: Will the Net really connect us in a new kind of grid -- or simply disconnect us from reality more efficiently? Will it hand marketers new and more efficient tools to bombard us with "information" that breaks down our understanding of the world in order to sell more computer peripherals and toothpaste? Or is there any hope that the new medium might knit back together a social middle ground somewhere between 1 and 200 million? The new online world -- full of intelligent agents and software filters and push media and infobots -- hands us an ever wider range of choices, but the options are less and less comprehensible. As we all struggle to make sense of this informational onslaught, Trow's thoughts on "choice" and the art of the con are worth reading. More than once. The con man does give you something. It is a sense of your own worthlessness. A good question to ask: "Does this event exist without me?" If the answer is no, leave. You are involved in a con game. When the con man tells you that he is about to present you with "a wide range of options," ask for one thing he will absolutely stand behind. Or beat him up. If he has some authority, you have a right to see what it is. If he is only describing the authority he senses in you, then do as you please. April 10, 1997 Is the "information glut" real? How do you cope with it? Come to Table Talk's Digital Culture section to exchange more information. |