Bingeing on Information?

            In her segment entitled “Information Overload,” on the BBC Radio 4 program A Point of View, historian Lisa Jardine examines the trials and tribulations of an increasing ability to record and preserve huge amounts of information for future generations over the past few hundred years. In the article we examined last week, Nicholas Carr argued that the internet is flooding us with more information than we can usefully handle, and that this constant stream of information is breaking down our ability to focus and extract useful things from the flow. Ms. Jardine makes a similar argument; however, she also shows that this is not a problem that is unique to the internet, and in fact has been examined since the invention of the printing press for a solution.

“‘Too many books, too little time’ was the complaint of scholars like Erasmus and Descartes,” as Jardine says, which sounds not so very different from Dan Misener complaining that “[he] often feel[s] overloaded with information,” “with [his] always-flowing Twitter stream, borderline-unmanageable list of RSS feeds, and…unanswered email” (“Information Overload”; Misener 1). However, in those hundreds of years in the past, books, though more permanent than memory, were vulnerable to weather, fire, war, and other disasters. During the Dark Ages, all of the knowledge of mankind was nearly lost, and so in the early days of the revival of literature, there was a “theme of knowledge rescued from near-oblivion,” which, of course, necessitates a constant effort to preserve all knowledge for eternity (“Information Overload”).

This effort has, it seems, carried over into the internet, which has become a repository for all of the information everywhere. This serves to increase the effect that Carr examines, the need for, almost an addiction to, a constant stream of new information – with all of the information everywhere at our fingertips, it becomes an impossibility to remember and make use of all of it. However, because it is there, it decreases our ability to concentrate on the things we actually want to know and understand, from novels to textbooks to abstract thoughts that require real examination. Carr’s point was that in order to learn to focus, to read deeply, again, we have to train ourselves to stop relying so much on the stream of bits for our information. Lisa Jardine believes that it is not necessary to give it up completely. Using the example of darning socks, she shows that much of the information still out there is now outdated and essentially useless, other than as a historical curiosity, and that we have to learn how to forget some of what we know. As in writing a novel, or, as she says, a history, “a clear thread has to be teased from the mass of available evidence, to focus, direct and ultimately give meaning to what has been assembled,” and in order for that to happen, some things may have to be glossed over, or forgotten, or even just buried out of sight of the casual reader (“Information Overload”).

            It is my belief, though, that similar to what I stated in last week’s post, to fight information overload, we have to take control of the information we experience. In a way, it is analogous to losing weight. You can ensure that you analyze the information you take in, understanding it and connecting it to other things you know, as I emphasized in response to Nicholas Carr’s article. This is akin to exercising. Dieting, the other half of losing weight, is then analogous to Lisa Jardine’s argument that to control overload, you have to limit what information you take in, in essence ‘forgetting’ information. As Dan Misener realizes, “most of [his] own personal information overload is entirely self-induced,” and that “‘while the constant flow of information is entertaining and addictive, it is, by overwhelming consensus, primarily filled with bits that are of little to no value’” (Misener 1). So, in order to control information overload, a good place to start would be to cut out the portion of your daily dose of information which is “entertaining and addictive” but has no benefit, with nothing to analyze, understand or connect with important bits of information. In Jardine’s words, we have to “prune the evidence” in order to “make sense for posterity” – and ourselves (“Information Overload”).

Works Cited

Jardine, Lisa. "Information Overload." A Point of View. BBC. BBC Radio 4, 6 Jan. 2012. Radio.

Misener, Dan. "How Much Information Overload Is Self-Induced?" Spark. CBC, 20 Feb. 2009. Web. 15 Feb. 2012. <http://www.cbc.ca/spark/2009/02/how-much-information-overload-is-self-induced/>.