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COMMENTARY
March 12, 2011
The info debris
On the topic of "reductio ad absurdum" (always a topic in the daily news), I called up a Twitter search yesterday, on the word "tsunami." My screen immediately filled with tweets logged "10 seconds ago," with a few at the bottom logged "20 seconds ago." Within a few more seconds, a message flashed: "44 more tweets since you started searching." After reading the top 10, and observing that each was pointless, I returned to the BBC.A tsunami on the tsunami in Japan. Perhaps a different term is required. (Multiplicatio ad absurdum?) For in an environment with "too much information," we aren't exactly reduced to absurdity, but start with that, and spread it around. A priestly friend reminds of William of Occam: "Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem." That was a good 14th-century way of attacking "too much information." It is commonly misrepresented today as, "the simplest explanation is usually the best." The quote itself did not come from Occam, but was a 19th-century paraphrase; and the idea can be traced back to Aristotle: that to understand something, you must eliminate the clutter, of things merely plausible, or interesting but irrelevant. "Occam's Razor," as the logicians call it, tells us to look not for the simplest, but for the most succinct explanation. For that matter, the term "breaking news" -- which, owing to the prevailing inflation, has become a daily commonplace throughout the media -- could be replaced with the tag, "too much information." Information is, like dirt, worthless, until someone finds use or value in some part of it. At that point, we do not wish to multiply the dirt, but to reduce it, through some mining or smelting operation. I am not suggesting the huge earthquake that hit Japan is not a significant matter, that it is not news, that it should not be reported, and prominently. I am merely observing that when everyone is talking, you can't hear a thing. My column today was going to be about Twitter and Facebook and other innovations of that sort, which now provide us with significantly more information. That earthquake intervened, with "breaking news alerts" -- which are like breaking news, but further inflated. My point was going to be about the speed at which our whole society is, as it were, reducing itself through multiplication. That earthquake now provides Exhibit One. I try, in writing these columns, not to climb out on limbs; to restrict myself to the obvious, the central, the balancing, the self-evident. If there is any point to my efforts, it is to draw attention to big obvious truths that almost everyone is neglecting. For little truths are little, but big truths are big. And this is the big truth here: that we are, collectively, descending through layer under layer of fatuity, or as it were, mining our way to Hell. Look around in street, office, and bus, at all the people plugged into small devices, "linked," as if in some stupendous electronic chain gang. Rigidly held, by short spans of attention. Consider that, barely a generation ago, none of these devices existed in the mass market, and that the only distraction that could be offered to a person getting on with his life, was the ringing of a telephone. Radios and televisions could be turned off, though alas they seldom were. Even so, they stole only half of your attention. Newspapers could be read, but not constantly. (Indeed there was already too much information, and the papers had fattened to many times their original bulk, so simply turning unread pages began to cost time.) In this tiny blip of history, our world has been "wired," we have agreed to be "connected," and in almost every waking moment our minds are now "elsewhere." And therefore increasingly unable to follow any continuous plot. Marshall McLuhan famously uttered the words, "the medium is the message." In the end you cannot say anything via Twitter, except Twitter. Though you may not intend it, every half-assembled comment contributes to the general reduction into absurdity. If brilliant aphorisms are ever uttered, they are drowned the next moment in the tsunami of electronic sludge. It takes very little space to present significant hard news, and this is ideally done straightforwardly and dispassionately. The rest is filler, and temptation to editorialize. This was once known to the editors of newspapers: that filler does not add. It can only dilute, distract, and contaminate. Longer articles could also be commissioned, from knowledgeable persons, providing background for more leisured and thoughtful reading, or a "point of view." We tried not to slur the categories. There were tabloids for people who did not "need to know," but only to be distracted. Alas that, and only that, is expanding, in our seven-billion channel universe. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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