By Tony Long
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The Luddite
The numbers, given in exabytes, aren't that important. The usual outlandish comparisons to tangible objects were intended as much to give you something to yak about around the water cooler as to provide any real perspective. My favorite: The amount of digital information out there is equal to 12 stacks of books, each reaching from the Earth to the sun. What Einstein dreamed that one up -- and what was he smoking when he did it?
Never mind. It doesn't matter, even if he miscalculated by a stack or two.
The point is taken. We have more information at our fingertips, by far, than at any time in history. And because of the internet we don't even have to stand up to go looking for most of it.
By digital information, the researchers were referring to everything from online videos to e-mail to instant messaging to web pages. I'd like to pay particular attention to this last one, especially those that focus on delivering the news.
Never before has so much news been within reach of li'l ol' you, tucked away there behind your keyboard. In an instant, you can be connected with news organizations the world over, soaking up the latest about the French presidential elections, or the price of tea in China. So how come you know so little of what's going on out there in the big, bad world?
Don't get huffy about it. You know what I'm talking about.
Americans have traditionally been ignorant of the world outside their own limited field of vision. It's a fact that drives other folks, especially Europeans, bonkers. It's also one of the reasons we get suckered into fighting wars in places like Vietnam and Iraq. I'd wager a month's salary that, four years in to our current unwinnable war, two-thirds of the people in this country still can't find Iraq on a map.
In any case, it's been two years since a presidential commission informed President Bush and the nation that there had never been any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Yet, as of January, fewer than 60 percent of us believed the Bush administration connived its way into war. Come on. You'd have had to have spent the last two years on a coroner's slab to still think we had any justification for invading a sovereign nation.
Is this willful ignorance or just plain stupidity on our part? Or is it just overweening arrogance? Whatever it is, it's a sure sign that we, the people, are still not paying attention. And in this day and age, that's especially unforgivable.
But there's another American tradition at play here as well: our historic aversion to facing bad news. In the land of milk and honey, where the streets are paved with gold, it's "annoying" (to use the current vernacular) to contemplate all the horror that surrounds us and, more and more, consumes us.
This is one of the aspects of news delivery in the digital age that really bothers me. Most news services, including this one, allow you to configure your RSS feeds and e-mail alerts to receive only the news that interests you. If you're an investor, for example, you can set up your feeds to deliver only financial news. If you swill Budweiser for a living, you may get no further than your digital sports section.
So, while you might be aware that the market took another dive, costing you a few bob, or that the Red Sox are pinning their hopes on a $160 million pitcher from Japan, you are, in effect, capable of shutting out the rest of the world. And why? Because you're too busy, or too uninterested, or too "annoyed" to deal with it.
Assuming you no longer read newspapers -- and studies suggest that more and more of you have dropped the habit -- you can actually go through life without having any idea at all what's going on in the wider world. (Watching TV news doesn't count, by the way. That's always been a joke, at least since Uncle Walter hung 'em up.)
Oh, the irony. All that information as close as your computer screen and there you sit, pondering the deeper meaning of Anna Nicole Smith's death because that's what your RSS feed has been told to deliver. The Chinese may be pouring across the Yalu River again, if that works as an economic metaphor, and the icecaps might be melting, but you'd never know. Or care.
Is it any wonder the world is in the process of blowing up, or burning up, or just plain giving up?
reposted from: Wired via clipmark - wildcat
my: highlights / emphasis / key points / comments
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