The Blind Giant (8 page)

The feeling of
information overload seems to consist of a small parcel of sins, of which the first is noise – and not just ordinary clatter and bustle. It is a noise of the mind, the relentless howl of the exterior world, possible only because technology is an open pipeline into our lives, and more specifically into the hearth: the place which is set aside for the things that matter. The word ‘hearth’ – the old word for a fireplace, which evokes notions of the duty of a host to a guest and vice versa, and which proposes an almost medieval life of wood ovens and pre-industrial simplicity – has a primal feel which is I think entirely appropriate to this discussion. This is very much a personal, instinctual thing.

It need not be a literal fireplace, but consciously or not we take the notion of ‘hearth and home’ very seriously. We really dislike anything that threatens the sanctity of the hearth, even by doing something as innocuous as crossing the threshold by phone or email without permission. Ask yourself how annoyed you get about telemarketing calls, or – a step up – how irritating it is to have a guest who outstays their welcome. More seriously,
consider how much stress you feel about mortgage payments, or renovations, and, by contrast, look at how many people were prepared to get themselves into vast, irredeemable debt in order to secure a permanent home. Look at the power of the political pledge to enable us to buy our own homes, and at the number of revolutions and wars begun with the promise of land. The hearth is where we do our real living, it is what gives meaning to the hours we spend working and administering. It is our most profoundly personal place, a definitive statement of our identity as well as a component of it. It’s our reward: the ‘life’ part of the work–life balance and the centre of domestic fulfilment. It is – or time spent there is – to some extent the thing preserved by philosophies of ‘slow’ evolved to combat the hectic pace of modern life. The hearth is where we play, in the broad social and philosophical sense of the word; it is where our humanity is initially learned and ultimately asserted. Intrusion into the private space of the hearth is the most unsettling and unwelcome of invasions.

Except that, in a way, it’s not an invasion at all. The hearth, once a very simple, solid thing with discrete boundaries, has been extended into the world. The telephone allows us to reach out; the television allows us to see out; the computer allows us to search, to send messages and so on. We have positioned these things within the compass of the private space, and extended its reach. At the same time, we have made it somewhat porous. We have extended our personal space into the digital, storing images and parts of our history, interacting online. We make common digital spaces with family members overseas, with friends in other locations. We even shop from our living rooms, allowing a limited amount of the commercial world to enter our homes. We have extended the hearth to meet other hearths, and to connect with the aspects of government, media and commerce which are designed to face the private space.

The benefits of the extension are profound; the openness they
require is, if not a vacuum, at least an area of low pressure, into which capitalism and administration have naturally flowed. Much of what digital technology does, good and bad, is achieved by a kind of blurring of the lines. We have blurred the boundaries of our most important spaces, and done so deliberately if not knowingly. We now have to learn to control the tide, to push back against the inward pressure. The boundary between the world of relaxing baths, partners and children, dogs, and the hearth and the world of work has become blurred. Distraction shatters focus, and, once gone, it’s hard to re-create the fragile entity that is a mood of peace and tranquillity; but even more, to reconstruct the sense of private place and safety. Before ever there was Myspace – the first of the big social networks, which aptly recognized the importance of a bounded personal area online – there was the hearth space, and physical or not, outmoded or not, we need it.

In response to the external pressure, some people simply shut down or refuse to engage. A lawyer who worked in my wife’s office when she was starting out refused to hold any meetings by phone at all, and did everything either in person or by letter. These days I suspect that is simply impossible, unless you are sufficiently powerful in your own arena that you are able to define the rules, but how you would get to that point these days without using digital communications I’m not sure. All the same, many people of my parents’ generation own mobile phones but carry them switched off, getting them out only to make calls and immediately putting them back to sleep as soon as they have finished. My father in particular has a tendency to do this, often leaving me messages to which I therefore cannot hope to reply. I’ve likened this to the old children’s game of banging on someone’s door and then running away, but he remains Luddishly and somewhat joyfully unrepentant.

The interesting aspect of this solution is that while it protects the hearth space by blocking the channel, it doesn’t seem to help
with the feeling of pressure: in the case of people I know who have adopted this or more extreme strategies (one woman threw her mobile phone into the Thames), the results are the opposite of what is intended. The phone, inactive, becomes an accusation or a harbinger of doom. ‘What if someone’s really trying to reach me in an emergency?’ I turn my mobile off overnight, on the basis that anyone who really needs me at 4 a.m. has my home number. The landline phone is next to the bed. As in most things, I’m midway between the Always-On generation (young Americans overwhelmingly go to bed with a mobile turned on and close to hand or even under their pillows, which according to a 2008 study might have a negative effect on sleep, leading ultimately to ADHD-like symptoms, although a larger experiment a year earlier found ‘no support for the notion that the aversive symptoms attributed to mobile phone signals by hypersensitive individuals are caused by exposure to such signals’)
¹
and the previous one.

But the spectacle of people on buses, in the street, with their children, alone on park benches, bending over their handsets and tapping at the keys – and the awareness that in one’s own pocket there’s a device very much the same which is even now bringing in messages from friends, colleagues, bosses and commercial entities, 24/7, every week of the year – can create a feeling of oppression. The intrusion of work into the hearth space, of responsibility into the place where professional responsibility is supposed to be shelved in favour of home life, is particularly hard to handle. It’s worth noting that the idea that work messages must be answered immediately has more to do with the nature of our relationship with capitalism than it does with our understanding of technology, but, in a sense, that’s a dodge: capitalist enterprise will expand to fill the available space, and in any case, the technology and the culture have grown up together. And on the subject of noise, the nay-sayers certainly have a point. Fifty million tweets and 200 billion (yes, billion) emails are sent every
day. We are generating more communication now every few days than we did from the dawn of human history until 2003. And much of it – as science fiction novelist Theodore Sturgeon could have told us – is crap.

Somehow, we need to come to terms with the influx; and switching off doesn’t appear to be the answer. Refusing to connect is like refusing to open your post: it doesn’t solve the problem, it just leaves you ignorant of what’s happening, and gradually the letters pile up on the mat.

Alongside the sense of intrusion is a gnawing fear that the modern world quite simply contains too much we ought to know, or need to know. It’s not obviously a digital issue; rather, it’s a consequence of the ethos of factual inquiry which comes from the scientific and technological current in our society. Issues of how we feel are not clear-cut or always entirely logical, but it seems to me that the blame for this aspect of
information overload is cast on technology for its place as a part of the scientific family.

And inquiry certainly does yield complexity, because we inhabit a world which is complex. In academic study and practical research we have pushed back the boundaries of ignorance as the Enlightenment promised that we would. In consequence there is so much more to learn in every sphere of life that we either become hyper-specialized or, in choosing a broader spectrum of
knowledge, accept that we cannot know everything which is to be known about our subjects. When I was a child, I was told on a museum visit that
Sir Isaac Newton was the last man to know the entire field of mathematics as it stood in his time. After Newton, the story went, it was simply impossible to absorb it all. Since then I’ve heard the same thing proposed about
Carl Friedrich Gauss,
Gottfried Leibniz, and a half-dozen others. It doesn’t really matter which of them – if any – genuinely deserves the title. The point is that no one now can claim it, or
anything like it. In 1957 Colin Cherry wrote in
On Human Communication:

If it was true then that knowledge had outstripped our capacity to retain and process it, it’s vastly more so now. Universities complain that they cannot bridge in three or four years the gap between the end of the school syllabus and the place where new work is being done, either in the commercial sector or in Academe. The quantity of information and theory available is boggling, so that on any given topic there may be multiple schools of conflicting thought, each of them large enough to be a lifetime’s study by itself. The situation of any project with a broad scope is analogous to that of an artist painting the Alps: she tries to capture the scale of the peaks, the colour of the sky, the appalling drop to the valley floor, but has no hope of accurately rendering the village in the distance or the great swathe of landscape directly behind her back. Moreover, the picture will reproduce only the visual scene, not the scent, the sound, the taste of the air or the texture of the rock. The other senses can only be suggested.

The most egregious example of a glut of complex issues all bound to one another, though, is probably government – by which, inevitably, I also mean politics. Any claim by one party
will be furiously rejected by another, and both claim and counter-claim will be couched in terms that are either incomprehensible on the face of it or ostensibly clear-cut but somehow freely interpretable. Worse yet – the final part of the information overload problem – no issue occurs in isolation. Issues which are themselves complex and require complex solutions are connected to others which appear to pull in the opposite direction: political programmes inevitably have to be paid for, creating what appears to be a budgetary zero-sum game in which a positive must be measured against a corresponding negative – the hope being that the consequences of the first will leverage the consequences of the second and we can all go up a level. More often they seem to drag one another down.

At the same time, some or all programmes will have unforeseen and unforeseeable consequences, good or bad. In
Freakonomics
, economist Steven D. Levitt and author Stephen J. Dubner trace the unexpected consequences of incentives and apparently unrelated social policies. The paths they follow are convoluted, but the lesson is that everything is connected – according to
Freakonomics
, the failure of the ‘urban superpredator’ to appear and make the streets of American cities unsafe in the 1990s can be traced not to programmes of education or tougher juvenile sentencing, but to the legalization of abortion in the 1970s – and while the connections are often unexpected they are powerful and close. The human world is not a loose-knit bundle of strands from which one can be plucked out, but a snarl of cross-connected threads woven together by centuries. Our social systems, after all, are not created by a design team but evolved to cope with changing conditions and forever struggling to catch up.

The only way through the maze might seem to be to go back to the source and try to build your comprehension from scratch, but that’s almost impossible; quite often you’d need years even to understand the questions, let alone acquire a full understanding
of the opposing positions. And yet without that understanding, how can you decide whether you believe in – for example – proportional representation voting systems? The pros and cons of a flat tax, the national need for a nuclear deterrent, or membership of the European Union? The stakes are so high, and yet the answers seem to be utterly mired in complexity. The broadcast television news was bad enough, but now every social networking site includes feeds and miniature party political broadcasts, debates and opinions about issues local and global which seem to have a direct connection to our lives – indeed, they seem to propose our personal complicity in decisions of which we greatly disapprove. There’s an obligation upon us, surely, if the information is there, to inform ourselves about our moral liabilities and act.