What good is information?
The internet promised to feed our minds with knowledge. What have we learned? That our minds need more than that
by
Dougald Hine
Dougald Hine
is a British writer. He founded the School of Everything, Spacemakers,
& the Institute for Collapsonomics. He wrote Uncivilisation: The Dark
Mountain Manifesto (2009) with Paul Kingsnorth.
On my morning bus into town, every teenager and every grown-up sits
there staring into their little infinity machine: a pocket-sized window
onto more words than any of us could ever read, more music than we could
ever listen to, more pictures of people getting naked than we could
ever get off to. Until a few years ago, it was unthinkable, this
cornucopia of information. Those of us who were already more or less
adults when it arrived wonder at how different it must be to be young
now. ‘How can any kid be bored when they have Google?’ I remember
hearing someone ask.
The question came back to me recently when I read about a 23-year-old
British woman sent to prison for sending rape threats to a feminist
campaigner over Twitter. Her explanation for her actions was that she
was ‘off her face’ and ‘bored’. It was an ugly case, but not an isolated
one. Internet trolling has started to receive scholarly attention – in
such places as the Journal of Politeness Research and its counterpart, the Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict – and ‘boredom’ is a frequently cited motive for such behaviour.
It is not only among the antisocial creatures who lurk under the
bridges of the internet that boredom persists. We might no longer have
the excuse of a lack of stimulation, but the vocabulary of tedium is not
passing into history: the experience remains familiar to most of us.
This leads to a question that goes deep into internet culture and the
assumptions with which our infinity machines are packaged: exactly what
is it that we are looking for?
‘Information wants to be free’ declared
Stewart Brand, 30 years ago now. Cut loose from its original context,
this phrase became one of the defining slogans of internet politics.
With idealism and dedication, the partisans of the network seek to
liberate information from governments and corporations, who of course
have their own ideas about the opportunities its collection and control
might afford. Yet the anthropomorphism of Brand’s rallying cry points to
a stronger conviction that runs through much of this politics: that
information is itself a liberating force.
This conviction gets its charge, I suspect, from the role that these
technologies played as a refuge for the Californian counterculture of
the 1960s. Brand himself embodies the line that connects the two:
showing up to meet Ken Kesey out of jail in the opening of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
(1968) – ‘a thin blond guy with a blazing disk on his forehead… an
Indian bead necktie on bare skin and a white butcher’s coat with medals
from the King of Sweden on it’ – then creating the Whole Earth Catalog, the bible of the back-to-the-land movement, or, as Steve Jobs would later call it, ‘Google in paperback form’.
Before there was a web for search engines to index, Brand had
co-founded the WELL (the ‘Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link’), a bulletin
board launched from the Whole Earth offices in 1985. Its members pushed
through the limitations of the available technology to discover
something resembling a virtual community. At the core of this group were
veterans of the Farm, one of the few hippie communes to outlast the
early years of idealism and chaos; in the WELL, these and other
paisley-shirted pioneers shared their experiences with the people who
would go on to found the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1990 and Wired magazine in 1993.
This line from counterculture to cyberculture is not the only one we
can draw through the prehistory of our networked age, nor is it
necessarily the most important. But it carried a disproportionate weight
in the formation of the culture and politics of the web. When the
internet moved out of university basements and into public consciousness
in the 1990s, it was people such as Brand, Kevin Kelly (founding editor
of Wired) and John Perry Barlow (founding member of the
Electronic Frontier Foundation) who were able to combine the experience
of years spent in spaces such as the WELL with the ability to tell
strong, simple stories about what this was and why it mattered.
information took the place of LSD, the magic substance whose consumption could transform the world
The journalist John Markoff, himself an early contributor to the
WELL, gave a broader history of how the counterculture shaped personal
computing in his book What the Dormouse Said (2005). As any
Jefferson Airplane fan can tell you, what the Dormouse said was: ‘Feed
your head! Feed your head!’ The internet needed a story that would make
sense to those who would never be interested in the TCP/IP protocol, and
the counterculture survivors gave it one – the great escapist myth of
their era: turn on, tune in, drop out. In this new version of the fable,
information took the place of LSD, the magic substance whose
consumption could transform the world.
The trouble is that information doesn’t nourish us. Worse, in the end, it turns out to be boring.
A writer friend was asked to join a pub
quiz team in the village where he has lived for more than half a
century. ‘You know lots of things, Alan,’ said the neighbour who invited
him. The neighbour had a point: Alan is the most alarmingly
knowledgeable person I know. Still, he declined politely, and was
bemused for days. There can be a certain point-scoring pleasure in
demonstrating the stockpile of facts one has accumulated, but it is in
every other sense a pointless kind of knowledge.
This is more than just intellectual snobbery. Knowledge has a point
when we start to find and make connections, to weave stories out of it,
stories through which we make sense of the world and our place within
it. It is the difference between memorising the bus timetable for a city
you will never visit, and using that timetable to explore a city in
which you have just arrived. When we follow the connections – when we
allow the experience of knowing to take us somewhere, accepting the risk
that we will be changed along the way – knowledge can give rise to
meaning. And if there is an antidote to boredom, it is not information
but meaning.
If boredom has become a sickness in modern societies, this is because the knack of finding meaning is harder to come by
There is a connection, though, between the two. Information is
perhaps the rawest material in the process out of which we arrive at
meaning: an undifferentiated stream of sense and nonsense in which we go
fishing for facts. But the journey from information to meaning involves
more than simply filtering the signal from the noise. It is an
alchemical transformation, always surprising. It takes skill, time and
effort, practice and patience. No matter how experienced we become,
success cannot be guaranteed. In most human societies, there have been
specialists in this skill, yet it can never be the monopoly of experts,
for it is also a very basic, deeply human activity, essential to our
survival. If boredom has become a sickness in modern societies, this is
because the knack of finding meaning is harder to come by.
It is only fair to note that the internet is not altogether to blame
for this, and that the rise of boredom itself goes back to an earlier
technological revolution. The word was invented around the same time as
the spinning jenny. As the philosophers Barbara Dalle Pezze and Carlo
Salzani put it in their essay ‘The Delicate Monster’ (2009):
Boredom is not an inherent quality of the human
condition, but rather it has a history, which began around the 18th
century and embraced the whole Western world, and which presents an
evolution from the 18th to the 21st century.
For all its boons, the industrial era itself brought about an endemic
boredom peculiar to the division of labour, the distancing of
production from consumption, and the rationalisation of working activity
to maximise output.
My point is not that we should return to some romanticised
preindustrial past: I mean only to draw attention to contradictions that
still shape our post-industrial present. The physical violence of the
19th-century factory might be gone, at least in the countries where
industrialisation began, but the alienation inherent in these ways of
organising work remains.
When the internet arrived, it seemed to promise a liberation from the
boredom of industrial society, a psychedelic jet-spray of information
into every otherwise tedious corner of our lives. In fact, at its best,
it is something else: a remarkable helper in the search for meaningful
connections. But if the deep roots of boredom are in a lack of meaning,
rather than a shortage of stimuli, and if there is a subtle,
multilayered process by which information can give rise to meaning, then
the constant flow of information to which we are becoming habituated
cannot deliver on such a promise. At best, it allows us to distract
ourselves with the potentially endless deferral of clicking from one
link to another. Yet sooner or later we wash up downstream in some far
corner of the web, wondering where the time went. The experience of
being carried on these currents is quite different to the patient,
unpredictable process that leads towards meaning.
The latter requires, among other things, space for reflection –
allowing what we have already absorbed to settle, waiting to see what
patterns emerge. Find the corners of our lives in which we can unplug,
the days on which it is possible to refuse the urgency of the inbox, the
activities that will not be rushed. Switch off the infinity machine,
not forever, nor because there is anything bad about it, but out of
recognition of our own finitude: there is only so much information any
of us can bear, and we cannot go fishing in the stream if we are
drowning in it. As any survivor of the 1960s counterculture could tell
us, it is best to treat magic substances with respect – and to be
careful about the dosage.
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