Culled from the ``Opinion'' section of the October 15, 1996, internet edition of The Times.
We are weighed down with useless facts but a remedy is at hand
A big hand now, please, for a new disease. Stepping into the limelight to take its first bow is the very latest fin-de-millennium malady: Information Fatigue Syndrome. This is brought on by having too many pieces of information on tap, owing to the global electronic revolution and the fact that for the first time in history it is faster to process and transmit information than to read it (in the days of the quill pen and the manual typewriter, people thought twice before making the effort).
The disease has everything a modern ailment demands: panic attacks, palpitations, chronic exhaustion, joint pains, something called ``e-mail rage'', and sufferers prepared to testify that it took them five years' complete rest to get better. It can only be a matter of time before a celebrity succumbs in a public place, a pressure group is formed and poor Dr Stuttaford gets howled at again on the Rantzen Report.
Excellent, keep it coming, all this needs saying. Knowledge is power but information can be disabling. A report published this week says that one in four people get ill as a result of having to handle too much information. It costs British industry 30 million lost working days a year, or £2 billion. There you are, another statistic to make you feel even worse. Unfortunately, 85 per cent of the UK managers also said that they needed the information; as long as the stuff is out there somewhere, they want it, even if it makes them poorly.
The psychologist Dr David Lewis extends this gloomy dilemma wider: ``Professional and personal survival in modern society,'' he says, ``clearly depends on our ability to take on board vast amounts of new information. Yet that information is growing at an exponential rate''. He cites the old chestnut that a weekday edition of The New York Times contains more information that a 17th-century man or woman would have come across in a lifetime; and points out that the sheer strain of wondering what we should know, and where it is, means that we make stupid decisions and throw our bodies into a primitive ``flight-or-fight'' response. Brain chemicals command us to put a fist through the computer screen or run away and climb a tree; instead we have to stay passively hunched over our reports, brochures, memos, manuals, graphs, tables and printouts, letting them eat us. And we get ill.
Even Sunday at home becomes threatening. Just when we are getting to grips with EMU or Sir Gordon Downey, we are distracted by being told which headlouse shampoos contain organophosphates, that haddock may become extinct any minute, and that they have changed the rules on private pensions again. And that is before professional worries begin: in my handbag I have been carrying around for eight months the telephone number of a man at Salomon Bros who (according to a former Chief Whip I met at lunch) will explain EMU to me. I shall never ring him because there are too many con flicting explanations lying unread in the desk drawer already. It is not only journalists or analysts who feel a lurking guilt: everyone except a few lucky mystics, dimwits and drunks has moments when they wail: ``Why don't I know more about Mars, prison reform, Kabul, carbon-dating and which of the current round-the-world yacht races is which? The information's there!''
Take heart. It is not defeatist or obscurantist to admit that not everybody can know everything. Information is not the same as knowledge, and has little to do with wisdom or skill. Information is just random ammunition: witness the editor of Handgun magazine waffling on the Today programme yesterday about how two-thirds of a tenth of 1 per cent, or possibly one-third of half a per cent, of British homicides were caused by legal guns. Mr Stevenson might have been a good apologist for his sport if he had stuck to explaining it and thinking hard about making it safer; he tried instead to be an instant expert on crime statistics, and got nowhere. Politicians, not satisfied with being half-baked amateur sociologists, feel obliged to show their cultural breadth by singing cod Gilbert-and-Sullivan doggerel which doesn't even scan (a terrible cry went up in this house during Mrs Bottomley's rendition of her anti-Blair conference song: ``If this is Heritage, give me the mess of pottage!''). We can't all be good at everything; we can't all know everything. It is worth quoting correctly, for once, Pope's much misused lines:
``A little learning is a dang'rous thing,
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain
And drinking largely sobers us again''.
Given that the Pierian spring is now poured unremittingly over our heads 24 hours a day, there are two cures for information overload: one immediate and practical, the other touching on a trouble so deep that it will take longer.
The quick fix is obvious: erect filters. This takes determination. Zoologically, we are programmed to be distracted by everything. A wildebeest would not last long if it were too busy eating to notice the fresh lion-droppings round the waterhole. We instinctively swivel to every stimulus, but this must stop. Blind eyes must be cultivated, pages turned, choices made.
In the business world, growing services provide business people with terse one-page newsletters on selected themes. Internet servers offer ever more sophisticated search facilities (though a correspondent of this paper claims to have been looking for ``zen'' and got alt.sex.seniorcitizens. That's his story and he's sticking to it). Businesses should make a priority of setting up filtering systems, and discourage e-mail abuse. For the rest of us, it is notable that the publishing success of the year is The Week, a 30-page digest of British and foreign media done with wit, a genius for précis and such comforting headings as ``Boring but important''. In a year it has come from a garage office and 1,000 subscribers to more than 10,000. It provides a fine security blanket for those who get anxious about missing things.
With self-discipline and such aids, filtering is possible and real experience again becomes visible over the mound of information. But now the difficult bit: if we are not to try and know everything, we have to trust other people to. But while information is a glut commodity, trust has never been scarcer. The alarming slide in the reputation of public service in general and Parliament in particular is something that government has done remarkably little to halt, not even bothering to enforce the register of MPs interests. Trust in professionals crumbles apace: government accelerated this process through years of viciously insulting teachers, clergy, and public services. And who really trusts banks, since BCCI and Barings? Or IMRO, which gave the Maxwell pension schemes a clean bill of health?
In medicine, mutual trust is threatened by spiralling litigation. In commerce, it is crushed between marketplace ethics and aggressive consumer rights movements. We are unsure of what is in our food. In employment, casualisation and weasel contracts make it foolish to trust your employer or your employee. Everyone watches their back, all the time.
But to do this you need a lot of information, too much to take in and still get your own job done. Panic is never far from the most ordinary aspects of life. Come now do you really understand how your PEP works? Or did you just choose it because you liked the logo of the Mutual Equitable and Hardly At All Dodgy Investment Trust?
That, really, is the problem. Society is very complicated now. Unless we restore trust in one another and in the professions, the outlook is grim. We will all chase so many facts that we lose our grip and enter a dark age of rumour. Unless we each drink deeper at our own well of learning, and trust those at the adjacent springs, we shall grow even less good at making rational decisions. The field will be left to snake-oil merchants, soothsayers with blue plastic pyramids and foxily eloquent journalists. Nightmare.