Information Gluttony
Read Mercer Schudart
October 1, 1996
Have you ever spent two hours at Blockbuster's only to come out empty-handed? Have you ever come home after an all-day mall trip and realized you didn't buy the one thing you went shopping for? You will. And the companies that will bring this experience to you? All of them. Welcome to hyperglut overload, where millions flounder beneath an ocean of oblivia, moral absolutes are neither, search engines multiply like rabbits, and you still haven't found what you're looking for. As computer memory grows proportionately to public library closings, it's a good time to look at what you've got before it's gone. Quibbling over numbers rarely proves a point, but the familiar routine might help those viewers who've just tuned in. In America you have a superabundance of informational choice: 260,000 billboards, 17,000 newspapers, 12,000 magazines, 500 television stations; 40,000 new book titles and 60 billion pieces of junk mail each year; 20,000 new web sites and 41 million photographs taken each day. Add to this the eternal onslaught of radio, bumper sticker, and T-shirt data that flows through your head like so much background Muzak, and information glut is the environmental crisis of the twenty-first century. There has been more information produced in the last thirty years than during the previous five thousand. In a statistic that makes the kudzu threat feel positively nostalgic, one futurist predicts that by the year 2000 known information will double itself every second. Though startling, this statistic is so general as to be almost meaningless. Information known to whom? For what purposes? Exactly. The more knowledge, the more grief, as the Preacher said, and the more words, the less meaning. One begins to wonder how that profits ...
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