BBC calls for Information Diets

A summary of:

BBC News Magazine (2011). A Point of View: Does more information mean we know less? BBC News Magazine. 14^th January. Available from: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12191104. [Accessed 22nd January 2011]

Postman’s first point about technological change is echoed in this recent article from the BBC, which argues that improvements in information technology have in turn caused a decline in knowledge.

First of all, the article rightly points to our declining concentrations as the first hurdle to knowledge. This very problem is probably the reason I got interested in this topic in the first place. In basic terms, I think we’re getting dumber. A lightbulb went off when I saw Ellen Degeneres’ standup in 2003 in which she said: “We have all these buttons: speed dial, redial; you program numbers in so you never have to remember them anymore, and so you don’t, you know? Use it or lose it, I’m losing it. I don’t remember anything anymore because of the buttons that are remembering things for me.”

But I suppose this is more to do with the destruction of our mental capacities; whereas the article is getting at another worrying thing about our technologies, which has to do with the very nature of the medium; namely that it is not a path to knowledge. Knowledge has no place in a space dominated by the idolization of information.

One of the problems pointed out by the article is that we can never actually keep up with the stream of information. Ellen had another insightful comment on this predicament (see around 5:15 – 6:45):

The article points out that once upon a time, a person was not knowledgable because of how many different things he knew (i.e. the breadth of this knowledge) but how well he know one book, like the Bible (i.e. the depth of his knowledge). It seems odd to us today to think of reading one book over and over again. Who has time, first of all!? But then we don’t see this as the way to knowledge. We constantly search for it by consuming as much information as we possibly can. And if the goal is to learn it all, we are doomed to fail. Perhaps we need a new goal, then?

But then of course this gets back to Postman’s point, that the purpose of information technologies is not to inform so much as to entertain. The article here talks about information being exciting because of its novelty. Yes, this is the other reason we don’t read the Bible over and over again: because it’s so boring! The article suggests we ‘elevate’ ourselves by aiming for a depth of interpretations of a smaller set of books, developing “our intelligence and sensitivity.” Wisdom, they argue, does not come in reading more, but in reading better. (But this is a common confusion is a consumer society: isn’t More the same thing as Better???) This is their suggestion:

“The need to diet, well accepted in relation to food, should be brought to bear on our relation to knowledge, people, and ideas. Our minds, no less than our bodies, require periods of fasting.”

And if this isn’t a call for spiritual technology, I don’t know what is (and it’s from the BBC!!!): “It is then we might realize that – in attempting to follow the narrative of man’s ambiguous progress towards a state of technological and political perfection – we have sacrificed and opportunity to remind ourselves of eternal, quieter truths which we know about in theory, and forget to live by in practice.”