Why You Feel the Way You Do

Tweet

Can We Keep Up?
How did we come to a point where our own tools of enlightenment would cause such distress? Ours is a culture of knowledge, an Age of Reason rooted in the 16th- and 17th-century scientific inquiry of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton. Communications have been the lifeblood of civilization. But in our roaring technological prosperity, we have, so far, ignored the lesson Marshall McLuhan taught us decades ago: that every technology has positive and negative consequences for society.

Physically, we are what we are. So while we like to think of humans as adaptable creatures, the plain truth is that because of our complexity and longevity, we aren't nearly as quick to physically adapt as are many other species. Our brains have remained structurally consistent for more than 50,000 years, yet exposure to processed information in this century has increased by a factor of thousands. Something has to give.

Psychological tests reveal a bevy of clinical responses to data smog--confusion, frustration, overconfidence, and so on. But what does information overload look like in the real world? For some more personal snapshots of the overload experience, I sent out an electronic query on the Internet.

The response was stunning. From Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Britain, California, New Jersey, Minnesota, and Colorado, I heard from scores of people:

• An accountant who files all her forms on a computer without any difficulty but who becomes frozen with indecision when confronted with the open-ended world of the Internet.
• A lawyer whose progressive addiction to computers culminated in a terrifying nightmare about being trapped in an endless library.
• A librarian who has been professionally trained to grapple with mountains of information but who has lately succumbed to the feeling that the information supply is finally getting out of control.

And a vast assortment of others with memory troubles, sore backs, blurry vision, headaches, and so on.

I've also noticed a problem with my own memory and have had countless conversations with others as they tried to recall in vain where they came across some specific piece of information. "We're exceptional at storing information," explains UCLA memory expert Robert Bjork. "But there are retrieval limitations. We get overloaded. We know the name of that high school friend. It is in our memory somewhere, but we can't quite get to it."

The specific culprit involved in our increasingly spotty memories, he says, is "cue overload." Memory is stored according to specific cues--contexts within which the information is experienced. The problem comes when the contexts begin to vanish in the sea of data. Perhaps, like me, you now read nearly everything off the same computer screen, in the same sitting position, in the same spot in the same room. Perhaps the majority of your conversations now take place over the same phone in the same chair. "When many different things get associated with the same situational cues," explains Bjork, "you're going to have a greater difficulty remembering any one of those things. With information overload, retrieval becomes more difficult."

The new surfeit of choice also threatens our identities, our spiritual selves. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig offers a practical solution to the existential alienation people suffer from in modern society: his prescription is for people to reattach themselves to the technologies that they depend on by learning how they work. Sophisticated as we are, he argues, we still need to feel connected to our world in a rudimentary way. But Pirsig's ideas, sound as they are, are becoming obsolete. As the sophistication of the machinery increases each year, his solution of reattachment is increasingly unavailable to us. Sadly, we're creating a world so complex that each of us will understand less and less about it.

Analysis Paralysis
The proliferation of expert opinions has ushered in a virtual anarchy of expertise. To follow the news today is to have the surreal understanding that the earth is melting and the earth is cooling; that nuclear power is safe and nuclear power is not safe; that affirmative action works--or wait, no, it doesn't. In the era of limitless data, there is always an opportunity to crunch some more numbers, spin them a bit, and prove the opposite. With the widening pool of elaborate studies and arguments on every side of every question, more expert knowledge has, paradoxically, led to less clarity.

Statistics and hard facts are one of the fundamental ingredients of a just and civil society; but as with other forms of information, it turns out that too much of a good thing can have unwelcome consequences. The dramatic reduction in the cost of information production and distribution has ushered in an era of seemingly endless argumentation.

 PREV  1 | 2 | 3 | 4  NEXT 

Read more:

Sign-up for our Leadership and Managing Newsletter

Email Address: