Columns - 13 April 2009
Information overload makes it hard to get round to real life
The trouble is that we get far too much information pouring into our brains day after day. And at least 99 percent of it is of absolutely no use at all. Mostly what it does is provoke stress and anxiety and more often than not a feeling of helplessness in a world out about which we can do nothing.
How does it help us to make it through our days knowing, for instance, from Sky TV that there is a gridlock of traffic on the M5 into London, that yet another child has been abused and murdered in a quaint little English village, that more people have been blown to smithereens in a car bomb or by a suicide bomber in Afghanistan or Pakistan or for that matter to hear on a local radio stations in Cape Town that the traffic lights at an intersection of Umbilo Road and Gale Street in Durban are not working or, that male chimps prefer to have sex after eating meat.
And exactly what am I supposed to do after reading one of those a bright yellow stickers on cars that proclaim “Baby on Board.” Applaud!
Mark Twain, a former editor
and author of Huckleberry Finn said that the invention of the telegraph
signaled the end of news that mattered. It meant, he asserted that
instead of receiving local news about community events the reading
public would receive more useless information of absolutely no use to
them at all.
I recall the direction given to me by the former
editor of the Cape Times when I was appointed night editor of this
newspaper more years ago than I care to recall.
“Your
job, “ said Koos Viviers, “is to take all the news pouring into this
building from all over the world, and filter it to deliver only what is
important and relevant to the lives of the people of Cape Town, to help
them make decisions about their day.”
Then there was no Sky TV, no
internet, no websites, no blogging, no Twitter, no Facebook, no
streaming, no cell phones and no nothing except newspapers, radio and
local TV.
Then
came the big switch on and now we are bombarded with useless
information every second of every day. It pours in via e-mail, via cell
phones, via the internet, via radio and via TV.
It’s got to the
point that hardly anyone does any work anymore all we all do is e-mail,
and SMS mostly useless information to one another day after day, at
work and stare at TVs or DVD’s night after night at home.
How sad it is to drive past a DVD shop on yet another beautiful day in Cape Town where we are spoiled for choice of natural wonder, to see one family after another carrying a piles of rented DVDs to watch in curtained darkened rooms behind barbed wire and electric fences. A far better time is to be had, I believe, by switching it all off as often as possible and slipping out from under the rubble of useless information to enjoy a day in the sun.
This column appeared in the Cape Times on 13 April 2009.
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