Why You Feel the Way You Do

Nope, you're not imagining it--the tsunami of information pounding away at us is making all of us more anxious, less effective, and sometimes even sick. Knowing why is step one toward recovery

DATA SMOG

Information used to be as rare and precious as gold.

It is estimated that one weekday edition of today's New York Times contains more information than the average person in 17th-century England was likely to come across in an entire lifetime. Now information is so inexpensive and plentiful that most of it ends up being remaindered and shredded, as if it were worthless garbage. The first great paradox of the information glut is that we are becoming so information rich that we take much of what we have for granted.

Still, the concept of too much information seems odd and vaguely inhuman. That is because, in evolutionary-history terms, this weed in our information landscape has just sprouted--it is only about 50 years old.

Up until then, more information was almost always a good thing. For nearly 100,000 years leading up to this century, information technology had an unambiguous virtue as a means of sustaining and developing culture. Information and communications have made us steadily healthier, wealthier, more tolerant. Because of information, we understand more about how to overcome the basic challenges of life. Food is more abundant. Our physical structures are sturdier, more reliable. Our societies are more stable, as we have learned how to make political systems function. Our citizens are freer, thanks to a wide dissemination of information that has empowered the individual. Dangerous superstitions and false notions have been washed away: communicating quickly with people helps us overcome our fear of them and diminishes the likelihood of conflict.

Then, around the time of the first atomic bomb, something strange happened. We began to produce information much faster than we could process it. That had never happened before. For 100,000 years the three fundamental stages of the communications process--production, distribution, and processing--had been more or less in sync with one another. By and large, over our long history, people have been able to examine and consider information about as quickly as it could be created and circulated. That equipoise lasted through an astonishing range of communications media--the drum, the smoke signal, the cave painting, the town crier, the carrier pigeon, the newspaper, the photograph, the telegraph, the telephone, radio, and film.

But in the mid 20th century that graceful synchrony was abruptly knocked off track with the introduction of computers, microwave transmissions, television, and satellites. These hyperproduction and hyperdistribution mechanisms surged ahead of human processing ability.

In this way, in a very short span of natural history, we have vaulted from a state of information scarcity to one of information surplus--from drought to flood in the geological blink of an eye. In 1850, 4% of American workers handled information for a living; now most do, and information processing (as opposed to material goods) now accounts for more than half of the U.S. gross national product. Data have become more plentiful, are more speedily processed (computer processing speed has doubled every 2 years for the last 30 years), and are more dense. (From 1965 to 1995 the average network television advertisement shrank from 53.1 seconds to 25.4 seconds, and the average TV news sound bite shrank from 42.3 seconds to 8.3 seconds; over the same period the number of ads per network TV minute increased from 1.1 to 2.4.)

Information has also become a lot cheaper--to produce, to manipulate, to disseminate. All of that has made us information rich, empowering Americans with the blessings of applied knowledge. It has also, though, unleashed the potential for information gluttony.

Just as fat has replaced starvation as this nation's number one dietary concern, information overload has replaced information scarcity as an important new emotional, social, and political problem. With virtually no effort and for relatively little cost, we can capture as much information as we want.

With information production not only increasing but accelerating, there is no sign that processing will ever catch up. We have quite suddenly mutated into a radically different culture, a civilization that trades in and survives on stylized communication. And as we enjoy the many fruits of this burgeoning information civilization, we also have to learn to compensate for the new and permanent side effects of what sociologists, in an academic understatement, call a "message dense" society.

Audio buffs have long been familiar with the phrase signal-to-noise ratio. It is engineering parlance for measuring the quality of a sound system by comparing the amount of desired audio signal with the amount of unwanted noise leaking through. In the information age, signal-to-noise has also become a useful way to think about social health and stability. How much of the information in our midst is useful, and how much of it gets in the way? What is our signal-to-noise ratio? We know that the ratio has diminished of late and that the character of information has changed: as we have accrued more and more of it, information has emerged not only as a currency but also as a pollutant.

• In 1971 the average American was targeted by at least 560 daily advertising messages. Twenty years later that number had risen sixfold, to 3,000 messages per day.
• In the office, an average of 60% of each person's time is now spent processing documents.
• Paper consumption per capita in the United States tripled from 1940 to 1980 (from 200 to 600 pounds) and tripled again from 1980 to 1990 (to 1,800 pounds). In the 1980s the use of third-class mail (for sending publications) grew 13 times faster than the population.
• Two-thirds of business managers surveyed report tension with colleagues, loss of job satisfaction, and strained personal relationships as a result of information overload.
• More than 1,000 telemarketing companies employ 4 million Americans and generate $650 billion in annual sales.

I call this unexpected, unwelcome part of our atmosphere "data smog," an expression for the noxious muck and druck of the information age. Data smog gets in the way; it crowds out quiet moments and obstructs much-needed contemplation. It spoils conversation, literature, and even entertainment. It thwarts skepticism, rendering us less sophisticated as consumers and citizens. It stresses us out.