Cursed Tongue: Too Much Information: Confessions of an Addict

Posted by CursedTongue on January 9, 2006

Vast amounts of information surround us, filling every nook and cranny of human existence, which used to be crammed with void, mostly. Gone are the days when nightly entertainment consisted of darning long johns and staring into kerosene lamps. Between advertising revenue and people who want their 15 minutes of fame, there is something to see, do, hear about and to read almost everywhere. Unfortunately, the human brain can only hold so much.

My brain is no exception, but instead of letting go I attempt to take it all in and sort it all out. I know I’m an information addict because it’s gotten to the point where I find it difficult to sit and be in silence. The noise of the radio and the TV are nearly constant. I’ve become one of those people who leaves the TV on when I walk out of the room, and I still can’t explain it.

The Internet is a multiplicity of oceans of information. This article is not even a drop of sweat in the vastness of the Internet. It’s not even a nanodrop. There are a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and I don’t know about you, but I have yet to find anything on the Internet that looks even remotely like Hamlet. (I wish PETA would hurry up and liberate those typing monkeys so they can live the rest of their tree-swinging days enjoying the wilderness, instead of spending every waking moment filling my inbox with Spam.)

Because of my addiction, I can no longer stand using the flint and steel of browsers: Microsoft Internet Explorer. I have happily defected to Mozilla Foxfire, which lets me open multiple tabs in a window. It’s often that I have my e-mail and blog open on tabs in one window and anywhere from two to five subjects in other windows, each window with dozens of tabs open at a time. Mozilla allows me to Google a subject and open each of the results into a tab so I can flip through and not feel as though I am missing any data vital to researching stories I am working on.

Cable is another bastion of information overload. The Television brain trust is not only inserting more ads between the shows, but also more ads in the shows. Characters put on Crest Whitestrips before bed, the sound track has morphed into ads for bands, and the show is interrupted, not only by the dancing happy zippy banner ads, but also by the station ID, just incase we forget we’re watching, “Fox: the Soft-Core Porn Network.”

And I can’t be the only one who’s noticed that characters are talking faster then they used to. It’s so the networks can squeeze more commercials in between the plot cracks. In contrast, watching “Family Ties” reruns is like watching Spackle dry.

Which brings us to the ultimate information paradox. How can there be more than 57 channels and still nothing on? Why should we be subjected to the latest Kevin Trudeau miracle cure, or the newest butt and thigh shaper, or the most current and somehow even dumber incarnation of “I Love the 80s.”

How could we even start to purge this information overload from our lives? Why, we’d have to get rid of just about every possession and live in shacks in the woods. That didn’t work out very well for Ted Kaczynski.

It would require the mental discipline of the Dali Lama to block out the scenery-blocking signage, the retro shirts advertising Lucky Charms, and the constant buzz about the next panacea for curing the ails of modern life. So I guess, until advertisers find a way to insert commercial breaks into our dreams, I’ll have to be content with taking refuge in sleep.

- Sarah Letnes

Filed Under: Cursed Tongue, Guest Blog - Comments: Be the First to Comment



top