The Age of Information

Information, like technology and fried chicken, is loveable on the surface. When we read that we are in an age of information, we feel good and we feel proud. We feel modern and advanced and we feel smart. Information is valuable. Like the fried chicken, a big tub of information makes us feel like we have more command over our surroundings. It makes us smarter than our parents. It makes us more productive than those without so much information. 

I could go on. But my point today is that, like friend chicken, you can have too much of a good thing. And that includes too much information. I don't know about you but I shy away from picking up a newspaper, reading an online news source, listening to a radio news telecast or watching the TV news. Why? Because it is boring. It is boring not because of the color of the show or the beauty of the news purveyor. And the truth is that the stories are important. 

So what's the rub? The problem is that they don't know when the story is covered.  And they seem to want to drag out the same story for days if not months at a time. It's as if the press decided to cover a basketball game minute by minute. Imagine them writing a story on Monday that had the Seattle Superconics ahead 2-0 on a layup. And then they wrote an article on Tuesday when they went ahead by 4 points. Boring!

Think about the coverage you have seen lately. It doesn't matter if the topic was Covid or Russia or a missile launched by North Korea. Count the number of articles/stories that came out in the last two weeks about Russia and Ukraine. Could you really even count them? How many of those stories were identical? The first article might have been interesting and informative. But after thousands of similar articles,  I feel beat up by the process. 

I give them a break. I assume that the subsequent articles have something new or interesting or important. So I get sucked in. Read another one. But eventually I see that the story never changes. It is the same points and facts made over and over and over. What has really changed in the last weeks? Putin invaded Ukraine. Ukraine is a sovereign nation. People are dying in Ukraine. The world is unhappy and wants to do something about it. The same story over and over and over. 

What am I trying to change here? Do I want the government to throttle the press? Do I want the press to act responsibly and only print what is new? I don't think so. The marketplace ought to be able to handle this problem if other people feel as strongly as I do. A market can't know how to react responsibly to garbage information unless we start talking about it. Do other people feel the same way as me? 

It's not only that we are getting useless redundant information, Some news is being left out or crowded out by Russia and Covid. The press seems happy relaying another story about Russia or Putin or global warming when they could be writing more articles about the weather, low-rise jeans, suburban crime, Octogenarian sex, and the latest diet crazes.