One day in August, I decided to go on a diet - an information diet. I had had enough. Frankly, I was exhausted. The sheer glut of "news" entering my system each day was making me torpid, tired, and overwhelmed. Why did I feel the need for so much information?
Because, I felt, it wasn't enough to read a single newspaper each day - not when there was an election in Zimbabwe, a presidential primary in New Hampshire, and an earthquake in China, all unfolding or waiting-to-unfold or already-unfolded-and-waiting-to-be-analyzed.
As college students, we're told that we should "keep up with current events." We are being schooled in economics, literature, and the intricacies of tax law, but we must also educate ourselves about the ever-changing world. Understandable, and admirable.
But what is keeping up, anyway? "Keeping up" no longer means reading The New York Times every morning. Because these days, as Thomas Friedman and our professors and those beautiful iPhone commercials will remind us, we have all the information we could ever want at our very fingertips. Today, not only are there newspapers and magazines, but newspapers and magazines with their own Web sites, newspapers and magazines that exist only as Web sites, blogs, "Twitters," RSS feeds, "diggs," Breaking News Alerts delivered to your inbox, and football scores sent to your cell phone.
This doesn't even count the noise coming to you from your television, with all those pundits on the right and the left shouting to be heard above the ruckus.
These observations are nothing new. Neither is the tendency among our parents' generation, and even among the more idealistic of our generation, to look back on the pre-Internet past with starry eyes.
It was a simpler time back then, surely.
Was the stuff of politics less petty without the meaningless memes and bits and bites of information that have been thrown at us this election cycle? (Answer: probably not.) Wasn't it just, you know, nicer, to lick a stamp and send a letter in the mail instead of relying on the Internet to deliver your message?
To the neo-Luddites among us, technology has only brought evil - the bastardization of the English language, the degradation of our natural environment, the creation of weapons far too advanced and frightening to name. They recall T.S. Eliot's pre-pre-Internet lament: "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? / Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"
But then go tell hospitals that their technology is scaring you. And go and tell people in Third World countries that this technology is not for them, that they have no right to it, because it ruins everything.
Right. So let's conclude that this technology, this availability of information, this interconnectivity, is a good thing - even if there are days when I don't want to turn my cell phone on, even if I feel trapped under its weight.
So it was either July or August, and I was at Penn Station in New York. I was browsing the newsstand for something to read on my train ride home. The cover of The Atlantic caught my eye: "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"
"Yes!" I shrieked in my head. "Yes, that must be it!" I handed the cashier my money and grabbed the magazine from the stand.
The main thrust of the article was that if the Internet isn't making us stupid, per se, it may be rewiring the way our brains work. Have a hard time making it through your 500 pages of class reading? Perhaps the Internet has been reprogrammed your brain to pick and browse through the information, not immerse itself in it. A scary thought.
At the conclusion of the article, the author suggests the dark side of the information age: "As we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence."
Maybe that's it. I feel flattened. Maybe I feel as if I don't actually know anything anymore, but that I know that I could know it with the click of a mouse.
I think of how many times I've said, "Yeah, I read this story in this magazine," and couldn't finish my sentence, because I could hardly remember the details of the article.
I talked to some of my friends about this predicament. Some of them read a newspaper a day - enough to know what's going on, enough to be informed. To the more information-hungry among them, there's a general distrust of traditional media. TV news is too sensational, the newspapers are too liberal, magazines are too outdated by the time they hit the stands. They turn to the Internet. As do I. I've learned to scale down, however. I devote only a few days a week to deep Internet news-digging - since I still like doing this - and as for the rest of the time, I rely on a few newspapers.
When all else fails - when I feel myself drowning in the glut of information again - I get a little help from my friends. The other day, I said, "Lauren, what is wrong with our economy?" And she gave me a succinct summary of the day's events, along with a list of the key players involved and the possible outcomes. It was perfect. I was satiated.
Sometimes conversation is the best form of information.
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