The Information By Linda Stowe
I am not one to drone on about censorship, but I sometimes wonder if a case can be made for limiting access to some kinds of information. It used to be that way. I remember when it was common in the workplace to keep employees from knowing one another’s salary. The rationale for this was that it would be bad for employee morale. A more droll take on this would be that it would be bad for employees to know how poorly the company was treating them which might lead to talk of unions.
So for most of history certain information was kept under wraps, usually to prevent some sort of negative response or backlash. And for all that time we, the uninformed, stood in the darkness of ignorance because we didn’t know what we didn’t know. Then technology blew the top off Pandora’s box and the public dove in headlong to find out what had been hidden. We were in a veritable frenzy, eager for all manner of juicy tidbits like who shot JFK or what’s really hidden at Area 51? It was enough to make one drool.
Turns out it wasn’t as juicy has we had hoped. When the internet first became accessible, the information available was primarily research-oriented data shared between scientists and government researchers. Dry, boring, and unfathomable.
Today we have more information than we know what to do with, but that’s the problem. We don’t know what to do with it. We’re like young children trying to figure things out. Too often misunderstandings and wrong assumptions abound.
I was thinking about all this earlier this week as I was trying to self-diagnose some personal health issues based on my perusal of WebMD. Based on my research I am either allergic to my new soap or I need to move to a leper colony.
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Polly here.
I loved this. It is so true. We are immersed in a constant flow of information. Fifty years ago, this was not the case. We had to take great measures to find answers to our everyday questions. How tall is a giraffe? How big is the moon? Where is the hottest place on Earth? And on and on. It took a trip to the library. If we were lucky, we’d find our answer in the set of encyclopedias on the bookshelf.
Today, we have endless information available to us in mere nanoseconds. Click, and away we go.
I love delving into all this information, but as Linda said, it is more than we know what to do with.
My only advice is that we should do what we love. And if part of that is finding out about the world around us, take a deep, deep dive.
Just remember to come up for air every once in a while.
