Sorry for the sabbatical. Would mostly attribute it to procrastination, not to forget loads of work :P But will come back to these grave issues later.
Here's an article that was published in the April issue of the magazine New Scientist that just blew me away. I read it, and i just knew what was bothering me for a long long time- Information Chaos in the world's Kiosk. Though i have edited and remodeled it for general reading, you might find traces of authorial references in it.
A half-century ago, Marshall Mcluhan wrote: "We are today as far into the electric age as Elizabethans had advanced to the typographical and mechanical age. And we are experiencing the same confusions and indecisions which they had felt when living simultaneously in two contrasted forms of society and experience." His electric age had no email, no web-surfing, no cellphones, much less Facebook and Twitter. Mcluhan was mainly watching television.
We don't call it the electric age anymore. We know perfectly well that we are living in the information age. But Mcluhan was right: we are stil experiencing "confusions and indecisions", more than ever before. There is a universally recognised metaphor for our predicament: flood. There is a sensation of drowning, of information as rising, churning deluge. Data washes over us from above and below. One may lose the ability to impose order on the chaos of sensations. Truth seems hard to find amid a multitude of plausible fictions.
Our world is built on the science of information theory, created by engineers and mathematicians in the 1940s, but hard on the heels of information theory have come "information overload", "information glut", "information anxiety, and "information fatigue". This last was recognised by the Oxford English Dictionary in 2009 as a syndrome for our times: "apathy, indifference, or mental exhaustion arising from exposure to too much information, especially( in later use) stress induced by the attempt to assimilate excessive amounts of information from the media, the internet, or at work."
In 2007, the writer David Foster Wallace coined a more ominous name for this modern condition: "total noicse", created by "the tsunami of available fact,context, and perspective. He talked about the sensation of drowning and also of a loss of autonomy, of personal responsibility for being informed.
Another way of speaking of the anxiety is in terms of the gap between information and knowledge. A barrage of data so often fails to tell us what we need to know. Knowledge, in turn does not guarantee enlightenment or wisdom. It is an ancient observation, but it seems to bear restating as information becomes ubiquitou- and we live in a world where all bits are created equal and information is divorced from meaning.
The past unfolds accordion-like into the present. Different media have different event horizons: for the written word, three millennia, for recorded sound, a century and a half- and within their time frames the old becomes as accessible as the new. Yellowed newspapers come back to life. Under headings of "50 years ago"and "100 years ago", veteran publications recycle their archives: recipes, card-playing techniques, science, gossip, once out of print, and now ready to use. Same goes for every scrap of music and rarities that this world has ever produced. For a certain time, collectors, scholars or fans possessed their books and their records. Their was a line between what they had and what they did not.
That line fades away. Most of Sophocles's plays are lost, but the ones surviving are available at the touch of a button. Most of Bach's music was unknown to Beethoven; we have it all- partitas, cantatas and ringtones. It comes to us instantly, or rather at light-speed.
But this needs coping, to avoid the anxiety and the addictive cycle of craving and malaise. There are mainly two strategies that have emerged: Filter and Search. The harassed consumer of information turns to filters to separate the metal from the dross. Filters include blogs and aggregators- the choice raises issues of trust and taste. The need for filters intrudes on any thought experiment about the wonders of abundant information. When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.
A "file" was originally a wire on which slips of paper, bills, notes and letters could be strund fro preservation and reference. Then came file folders, file drawers, cabinets, and their electronic namesakes. But the irony is the same in all these cases: once a piece of information is filed, it is statistically unlikely ever to be seen again by the human eyes.
When new information technologies alter the landscape, they bring disruption: new channels and new dams rerouting the flow of irrigation and transport. The balance between creators and consumers is upset: writers and readers, speakers and listeners. Market forces are confused; information can seem too cheap and too expensive at the same time. The old ways of organising knowledge no longer work. Who will search, who will filter. We have no Maxwell's demon to help with our sorting!
Because omniscience is a curse. The answer to any question may arrive at the fingertips- via Google or Wikipedia or IMDB or YouTube or the National DNA Database or any of their natural heirs and successors- and we still wonder what we know. Choosing the genuine information requires work. Then forgetting takes even more work.
