Too much information

In a thoughtful essay, Joshua Benton muses on a side effect of our information-soaked modern environment. It's the kind of writing of which I don't see enough online, boasting a perspicacity that contrasts refreshingly with the dryly factual, often snarky technical and political writing that makes up the bulk of my reading. You should read the whole thing, but if you want to get to the crux of his thinking:

How many people think the tragedy of 21st century America is that there isn’t enough information to consume? How many people feel a desperate need for more “content” in their lives? If they consume much online news, there’s a good chance they experience some version of the anxiety Chee and Sontag talk about, the hyperinformed, undercontextualized mind. The major news organizations are engaged in a massive land grab, spreading their sites as wide as possible, adding in more blogs, more citizen journalism, more slideshows, more everything. I get the pageview-driven economics behind that. But have we made much progress in figuring out ways to present news in structures that reduce the information anxiety of our readers, not increase it? That have a satisfying beginning and end, not just an endless stream of “content”?

"The hyperinformed, undercontextualized mind." What a wonderful phrase.

Sontag's argument, according to Chee as related by Benton, is that novels are a way of making sense of the larger world: they reduce that world to a microcosm that is more readily comprehended by the mind. Benton argues that journalists ought to consider taking a larger role in that process of making sense of bigger things.

I think he's right, but is it too difficult a job to make it profitable? I worry that not enough people have the patience to pore through essays that do their subjects real justice, because the inescapable truth is that such pieces tend to be long. How many people really will read Jane Mayer's profile of the Koch brothers (it amounts to fourteen 8.5"x11" pages on my computer)?

I also worry about how trustworthy those pieces will be, or at least how trustworthy they'll be perceived to be. The context of information is rarely as free from controversy as the information itself. Quoting what the President said in a speech is straighforward; reporting how that speech jibes with the President's policy, or how it squares with the Administration's actions, invites rancor.

Yet we absolutely need to spend more time and energy making sense of what we see, hear, and read, rather than seeking more of it out.

I think a lot of people spend time following "news" that is actually bad for them. Going back a ways, was it really necessary to follow the O.J. Simpson case? The murders were unquestionably heinous, but when it came down to it, what difference did it make in your life?

Did the disappearance of [name of girl] from [place name] really matter to you, other than as a topic of conversation over lunch?

At some point, was there anything more to learn from [overseas disaster]?

These things are all important to someone, but in an age where we're bombarded by information from all sides, you have to be your own filter. Just as you have to watch what you eat, you have to watch what information you absorb. Only then do you stand a chance of making sense of it all.