July 8, 1997

‘Data Smog’: Created by Overload of Information

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Books of the Times

	— ** `DATA SMOG’ Surviving the Information Glut ** By David Shenk 250 pages. Harper Edge/HarperCollins. $24. —

Sometime around the middle of this century, David Shenk tells us in his new book, something happened to alter human history: "We began to produce information much faster than we could process it."

With the introduction of computers, microwave transmissions, television and satellites, we were pushed from "a state of information scarcity to one of information surplus, from drought to flood in the geological blink of an eye."

Today we are drowning in data, pelted by newspaper and magazine stories, 24-hour television news, e-mail, junk mail and faxes. Cellular phones, car phones and beepers ensure that we are always on call, while ubiquitous television sets – in bars, sports arenas, airports and airplanes – ensure that we never lack visual distraction. Advertisements have proliferated along highways, in schoolrooms and on the World Wide Web, and they adorn everything from our hats to our luggage to our shoes.

In "Data Smog," Shenk, a journalist and radio commentator, tells us that the average American spends 60 percent of the office day processing documents. In the 1980s, per capita paper consumption tripled (to 1,800 pounds a year), and third-class mail grew 13 times faster than the population.

Such statistics aren’t new, but Shenk has done a good job of pulling together a lot of observations about the downside of information technology and presenting them in a coherent and highly readable fashion. Though one may not agree with all of Shenk’s theories, his book nonetheless forces one to re-evaluate the effects that data smog has on daily life and its long-term social and political consequences.

As Shenk sees it, data smog is bad for your health, promoting stress, memory overload, compulsive behavior and attention-deficit disorder. It’s also bad, he suggests, for the health of the community, producing what could be called the Dennis Rodman or Madonna effect. By overstimulating us to the point of distraction, he argues, data smog forces people to resort to hyperbole and histrionics to get attention.

"The degree to which today’s television programmers, movie producers, performers, spokespersons and publishers apparently feel compelled to turn up the heat is a serious threat to moderation and intelligence in society," he writes. "It reduces our attention span. It makes us numb to anything that doesn’t lurch out and grab us by the throat."

Although much has been written about mass communications’ turning the world into a global village, Shenk astutely points out that that village is, at the same time, growing increasingly fragmented and factionalized as people, despairing of being able to master a grand overview, retreat into their own special interests. These days there are more and more niche magazines and more and more niche advertising targeted at specific audiences and neighborhoods. As a result, community begins to give way to tribes, shared values to irreconcilable differences.

The Internet accelerates this trend.

"Like niche radio and cable TV," Shenk writes, "the Net encourages a cultural splintering that can render physical communities much less relevant and free people from having to climb outside their own biases, assumptions, inherited ways of thought. This is perhaps best evidenced by the ominous emergence of so-called smart agents, which automatically filter out information deemed irrelevant to the customer."

With smart agents, there is no stumbling across unexpected subject matter, and there are fewer exchanges with people with different interests and opinions. As a result, both the idea and practice of pluralism suffer.

Throughout this book, Shenk admonishes readers to refrain from "info-pollution" by being economical in what they "say, write, publish, broadcast and post online."

This is advice that Shenk tries to follow himself, with largely admirable results.

Toward the end of the book, however, when he turns from sociological assessment to more subjective political analysis, his penchant for concision can lead to oversimplification.

He argues, for instance, that cyberspace promotes "a highly decentralized, deregulated society with little common discourse and minimal public infrastructure," and then goes on to make the gross generalization that "the digerati are helping conservative Republicans create the world they have been after for a long time."

In another chapter, he asserts that "the emergence of niche culture has also turned the tables on political alienation," suggesting that "poor minority groups" have ceased to be "invisible to the world and to each other" because they now have the ability to put out "their own ’zines, listservs, Web sites and cable TV shows."

Such reductive assertions unfortunately distract the reader from the other, more substantial arguments in this book, which despite its lapses stands as a useful overview of the unintended consequences of information technology.

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