Information Overload

It has become so accepted a truism that we live in a world of "information overload" as to be a cliche. Blackberries, email updates, compulsive texting and -- lord help us -- now it seems that every idiot with a laptop's got to have a blog (wink, wink).

Thing is, people have the situation exactly wrong. We actually live in a world of information deprivation. The more time we spend online or reading texts or ignoring the person next to us at the bar so we can read the scroll bar at the bottom of the CNN news ticker, the higher a percentage of our sensory input is devoted to discrete pieces of information: words, letters, numbers; rather than the constant sensory flux of interacting with a dynamic environment. In quantitative terms, a walk through the woods involves magnitudes of order more information in the form of visual, audio, and tactile stimulation absent from anything broadband can provide. Ask any roboticist and she'll tell you that the hurdles presented by developing a machine that can navigate the web are inconsequential compared to those presented by the development of a machine to navigate your living room.

All this isn't to say that our constant complaints are a symptom of some sort of cultural hypochondria. Rather, when we talk of "information overload," we're dealing with a botched pathology. What we do experience these days is discursive information overload. More and more, we get our info not in the form of raw sensory data, but rather in the form of propositional statements -- the world filtered through the symbolic medium of language rather than the world itself.

Now, this may, theoretically, be a temporary phenomenon. We are slowly moving toward a medial environment in which incoming bandwidth will exceed our processing capacity, where, like the Star Trek Holodeck, media will be capable of presenting a sensory environment indistinguishable from reality. Of course, dreams of virtual reality remain just that, dreams, and they show little evidence of approaching realization in the foreseeable future. (Not to mention the difficulties required of developing an adequate interface with such a system as well as the near insurmountable difficulties involved in producing content for an immersive world.)

But fantasies of Holodecks are like plans for building a Utopia, lots of fun and totally worthless. It seems unlikely, once our medial systems do manage to approximate the information bandwidth of lived experience, that most of us will choose to replicate in that future media environment a world as rich in sensory data as the real world. After all, as a culture, we generally choose to eschew the vivid pleasures of nature for the clean lines and discrete interfaces of our homes and laptops. Information is, after all, generally more distracting than functional, and as long as we plan to utilize it as a tool, we will require that it be user friendly, that it, keep us in an environment where we are so distracted by an overload of discrete, discursive information, that we can't stop and smell the analog (or at least digitally simulacral) roses.