Information Vs. Knowledge: How Information Is Deadening Our Minds NOW!

“Anyone who harbors the notion that [Jane] Austen’s circumscribed world of rural English parlors and parks was small-minded, provincial, or dull needs to reread Pride and Prejudice to reencounter the vigor of Elizabeth Bennet’s quick wit and astute social observation, or the generosity of Jane’s moral reflection, or the instructive trajectory of Darcy’s growth in self-knowledge, largely through defining moments of honest conversation with the woman he comes to love.”
–Marilyn McEntyre, Caring for Words In a Culture of Lies

The April 12th, 1993 cover of Time magazine was an unforgettable picture of a long series of images in rectangular formation entering an eyeball. The article was by Philip Elmer-DeWitt, who writes frequently on issues related to technology.

He wrote an article, in which he said the Internet would welcome in a new age of information. Information, which “wanted to be free,” would be available to more people than ever, on our phones and computers. People would be smarter, healthier, and happier.

DeWitt wrote: “The Internet, for those who haven’t been hanging out in cyberspace, reading the business pages or following Doonesbury, is the mother of all computer networks — an anarchistic electronic freeway that has spread uncontrollably and now circles the globe. It is at once the shining archetype and the nightmare vision of the information highway that the Clinton Administration has been touting and that the telephone and cable-TV companies are racing to build. Much of what Bell Atlantic and Time Warner are planning to sell — interactivity, two-way communications, multimedia info on demand — the Internet already provides for free. And because of its cold war roots, the Internet has one quality that makes it a formidable competitor: you couldn’t destroy it if you tried.”

Does anyone have a sedative I can take? This utter insanity.

We’re Drowning

The Internet has become a sea of disinformation, where people create information grottos where they invent “fake news” and lure others in to join them, like Ursula from Disney’s “The Little Mermaid.” In my estimation, no one is doing better. I don’t blame DeWitt. He couldn’t have known the cesspool of information that the Internet would become. But he could see complications lay ahead, as in that menacing sentence above: “You couldn’t destroy if if you tried.”

And it did seem like it would encourage people to access true, valuable facts, because they were so readily available.

I remember getting my first AOL account. That was more for social interaction. But I thought, “In the same way that I can create relationships in a much easier fashion, so will we soon all be able to find out anything we want to because of the Internet.” I was an information junkie, for sure, also. I devoured information. I had CNN on all the time, turned down so the anchors’ and reporters’ were a dim murmur but loud enough for me to focus on if I heard something intriguing as I wrote on my laptop, being a writer. I read hard-copy newspapers; bought books on my favorite topics, like Judaica, animal rights, and queer issues. All the while, I felt an itch, you might say, as I ingested all this information. I squirmed in my seat as I took it all in. I felt like a drug addict more than a gustatory connoisseur, though. It was making me anxious, this constant need to know everything and everyone that was “happening,” to everyone, and everywhere around the world at every moment.

Related: See What How Rhetoricians Wrote About Honoring 3 Close Friends I Lost.

My cousin, Jaffer, opened my eyes to a new way of seeing my consumption of this endless stream of new-now-next (as the news show’s title went). He said, “I hate information.” I realized I did–do–too.

Knowledge, on the other hand, is good. It’s contained in books, journals, and the like–libraries! Instead of making me anxious, it makes me feel energized and powerful and allows me to think in new and useful ways. In a class I took in journalism school at the University of Maryland at College Park, one of the required texts was “A Journalist’s Guide to the Internet,” by Chris Callahan, our teacher. In it he wrote that websites with the domains .edu, .gov, and .org were the most trustworthy. Dot-coms were less so, because they were generally about selling things to viewers. I always hunch my shoulders and cringe my eyes when I think of this, because I can imagine the contemporary, lunatic conspiracy theorists railing about how all of those entities are untrustworthy or controlled by ill-intentioned cabals of malefactors.

I disagree. The aforementioned websites contain well-vetted, meticulously researched, firsthand facts–knowledge. News sites, entertainment sites, and personal blogs altogether amount to a flurry of words, ones often not used well, claiming to clue is on must-know information. There are tens of millions (with millions added every day, often hijacks on “The Info Superhighway”) and are often, unintelligible, incomplete, or tediously self-involed.

And it’s all about sell-sell-sell, because they get money from advertising or subscriptions. It’s endless, seamless, and frankly, pointless. If I need to know something, as I was taught in my rhetoric and composition classes in graduate school, Wikipedia is an OK place to get leads. But you should then get the knowledge you’re looking for from the sources mentioned in the footnotes. And when it comes down to it–what I need to know versus what I can know is very different.

As the Nobel laureate Herbert Simon said: “In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently.”

The difference between information and knowledge is like that between idle gossip and a probing speech.

I believe strongly in the benefits of a liberal arts education, in which, as one of its champions from the 18th to the 19th century, Alexander von Humboldt, wrote: “There are undeniably certain kinds of knowledge that must be of a general nature and, more importantly, a certain cultivation of the mind and character that nobody can afford to be without. People obviously cannot be good craftworkers, merchants, soldiers or businessmen unless, regardless of their occupation, they are good, upstanding and – according to their condition – well-informed human beings and citizens. If this basis is laid through schooling, vocational skills are easily acquired later on, and a person is always free to move from one occupation to another, as so often happens in life.”

Ladies and Gentleman, I Now Present to You…Everything!

The disorganized format of most of the information on the Internet is part of its unappealing nature. In Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance rhetoric, a speech (or, now, more often, a piece of writing) was taught to be, ideally, been in this format: Introduction (wherein the author offers an initial entry into the topic to be argued), Narration/Statement of Fact (wherein the author puts forth what she/he/they are arguing, briefly), Proof/Confirmation, Refutation (wherein the author refutes his/her/their opponent’s view on the subject), and Conclusion (wherein the author inspires readers’ emotions to convince that all you’ve said previously is true, and summarize it).

I studied journalism at the University of Maryland College Park. I know “news,” much of what clogs the Internet takes on a different format. My excellent journalism professors taught me about the Inverted Pyramid. Your lead, the “must-know” of an article goes first and less important information follows. The thing your audience “needs” to know least comes last.

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In 2023 we, apparently, need to know every move anyone on Earth makes the moment they make it. The fault for this madness lies in the business model of journalism. News sites need to make money of clicks and advertising. I know this firsthand because I worked for four soap opera news websites. We reporters constantly scrolled through social media looking for what was, well, “new” with soap actors, soap operas, and on and on. I sat at my desk 10 hours a day for one of these sites to find four news stories and write four spoilers, one for each soap opera on the air at the time. I tried to write well, but my articles contained slapdash, 300-word-minimum (search engines only picked up articles with a minimum of 300 words then) articles. I rushed to finish 8 articles per day, and it showed in the quality of the information each provided.

Now, as a could-be-consumer, I’m thrilled, to avoid those soap websites and most news websites. As an inherently talkative person I’m glad not to have more to talk about by avoiding such sites. No one wants to hear my opinion on why this and why that. And why should they? We all have enough going on in our lives already.

Undergraduate college students often roll their eyes (I’m a big eye-roller, so I love that part), and sigh in exasperation as they say they don’t see the point in knowing about 19th-century European history, say, when they are going to be a doctor. But the point of a liberal arts education, and liberal arts educators, is to create informed citizens, who can do many things better than if they knew none of the things they learn in liberal arts classes–like vote intelligently, for one very, very important example.

An uncle of mine whom I love dearly, reads the New York Times cover to cover every day. He benefits from it. He’s a cardio-thoracic surgeon, and he’s curious about the world. I cannot imagine taking in all that information. I have to clutch my pearls just thinking about it! And I’d never be able to do it all at once, so all day I’d be thinking, “I have to read that article on the delights of Cambodian street food–when will I get the time?!?!?!!?”

Me? I’m with Lenny Bruce on this one. “The reason I don’t smoke it is because it facilitates ideas and heightens sensations–and I’ve got enough shit flying through my head without smoking pot.” Me too, Lenny, me too.

And…why? Why do I need to know as an nyt.com article headline read on December 19th, 2023, that, “Barbie Didn’t Make Our Top 10. Readers Spoke Up?”

All knowledge is useful. Most information is not. Not by a long shot. Now, part of my antipathy toward information stems from the fact that I have Generalized Anxiety Disorder, as diagnosed by a psychiatrist many years ago. I already knew it, but the official diagnosis got me on medications for it and led me to pursue non-chemical ways of managing it–deep breathing, meditation, and, as I’m a huge self-help book reader, books like How To Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable About Anything–Yes, Anything! by Dr. Albert Ellis. He co-pioneered Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Rational-Emotive Therapy.

I don’t care. I don’t care that, as the December 19th, 2023 edition of wapo.com wrote, “The Founders didn’t want a Mar-a-Lago executive branch,” whatever that means. On the other hand, I do want to know what the brilliant writer, Joshua Tyrangiel, has to say about AI in his column on that very “now” topic on the same website. But sifting through all this information and knowledge on the Internet is time-consuming and can be confusing.

Constant Contact

That’s the name of a marketing software program. The name alone makes me shiver in my seat as I write this. I will remain in “constant contact” with the world–my loved ones, various forms of media, and fliers on the bulletin board in my gym if I can. And now I can But I have to limit it. I have to. It’s too much. If someone were screaming in our ears constantly everything that’s going on with everyone its going on with at all times, as this New York Post article states “Five teens charged in savage mobs beating at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, (misspelled Marjory Stonemason Douglas High School) we’d all know that the information bombarding us at all times damages us. If I do need to know about this “savage mob beating,” it only emphasizes all the bad things in the world. Now I know about the beating and have to be reminded of “one of the worst school school shootings.”

Why is each word in that headline, also not capitalized, following Associated Press Style? Why do three pop-up ads for the New York Post’s sister publications come up as soon as I click on the link to the article? It’s because the Post isn’t trying to give us useful knowledge. It’s trying to get more clicks, more subscriptions, and more page views for money. “Money, Money, Money” as the song by Abba goes. Water, water everywhere–and not a drop to drink.

All knowledge is useful. But most information is garbage–a big pile of garbage that stresses me out to look at while destitute Indian people sift through it in a desperate attempt to find food, wares they could sell, things they have lost. That’s another thing with the glut of information available to us at all times. I don’t want or need to be reminded of the fact that 1 billion people in India are starving every day.