opinion
By Ron McAllister| Portsmouth Herald
It is good to be well informed, but last months election made me wonder if it is possible to be too well informed.It seems wrong-headed, but like the adage that you cant be too thin or too rich oh, yes, you can what seems true might be false.On the eve of the election, I started to feel like a goose on a foie gras farm; force-fed for the slaughter.
So much information flooded my email inbox that I could not read it all let alone digest it.It just became so much delete, delete, delete. Before the election, my emails were forecasting results that missed the mark by a country mile.Messages contradicted one another about expected outcomes.One email told me my candidates were nearing collapse (send money) while another saw victory at hand if only I would help (send more money).By the time the election was history, I was thinking about going on a news diet.
Nothing since Nov. 3 has diminished that impulse.And, of course, the requests for financial support have continued.The appeals did not end just because the election was over.More donations were needed for looming legal battles.I felt I had been reduced to little more than eyeballs and a credit card.
The election and its aftermath did nothing to restore my equanimity.Each headline was more eye-catching than the ones preceding.The news stories seemed intended more to disturb than to inform me, to worry me about the state of the nation, to create an anxiety that would motivate me to do something.
The attempted exploitations didnt work all that well.Refusing to give into fear, worry or anxiety, I started to tune out.I deleted emails without opening them; stopped reading online newspapers; cut back on my news feeds; stayed off Facebook.I barely resisted the urge to unplug completely.
How would the world be changed if I reduced what I read, watched or listened to?How would my life be compromised if I were to take in less information from people whom I do not actually know after all?Cant we just let the old president fade into the background?Do we have to think about his reality-TV presidency, his endless diversionary tactics, his numerous courtroom flops?Cant we just let the new guy get on with the job we elected him to do?Ill check back later.Its not apathy.Its information overload.
Talk to me about how to conform to CDC guidelines and still have a life.Email me about whats new in climate science or human rights or national security.Write to me about how to keep calm.But cease and desist with all the overblown stories about what is happening every other minute inside the Beltway.
My tendency toward info-exhaustion has done me in.Nothing showed that more clearly than the long rollercoaster ride that was this presidential election.I found it emotionally draining and still do.How about you?Ready to go on an information diet?There is a precedent.
In the first half of the 19th Century, prominent French intellectual August Comte developed an idea he called cerebral hygiene.This was his proposal for keeping his own thoughts free from contamination by what other people were thinking, saying and writing.The best way to know your own mind, he figured, was to completely ignore what everyone else thought.I like Comtes idea (for a time anyway).My version is an information fast.
It must have been a lot easier to ignore information 200 years ago than it is now.Today we swim in information (as well as disinformation and misinformation).Then there were newspapers, books and public lectures.Today we have those same sources, but we also have radio, television, mobile phones, text messaging, the internet, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and countless other ways to avalanche the news.Its a lot harder to ignore information today than it was in Comtes time, but ignoring it might be more necessary now.
It certainly would be easier to be more selective about whats out there than to try and take it all in.My current plan for emails and news feeds revolves around selectivity.If I dont take decisive action within 10 minutes of hearing about the latest doomsday event, its not because I dont care.Im ignoring pretty much everything at the minute.
Ron McAllister is a sociologist and writer who lives in York.
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Opinion/The Observer: Its not apathy. Its information overload. - Seacoastonline.com
