Theft at the Public Till
perception of the world is inevitably distorted in that it is selective; we can- not notice everything. And the more images with which we are confronted, the more distorted is our view of the world. "All the notions we thought solid, all the values of civilized life, all that made for stability in international relations, and that made for regularity in the economy ... in a word, all that tended happily to limit the uncertainty of the morrow, all that gave nations and individuals some confidence in the morrow... all this seems badly compromised. I have consulted all the augurs I could find, of every species, and I have heard only vague words, contradic- tory prophecies, curiously feeble assurances. Never has humanity combined so much power with so much disorder, so much anxiety with so many play- things, so much knowledge with so much uncertainty." Paul Valery "It's disquieting to hear that computers will provide us with more infor- mation. Perhaps you feel you're already bombarded with too much informa- tion. But what people really intend when they speak of information is mean- ing, not facts. Undoubtedly we're bombarded with too many facts-isolated bits of data without a context... To assign meaning always requires more information to organize what we already have, and computers have a talent for this organization. Computers can take large numbers of facts and convert them into comparisons, spreadsheets, graphs. In short, they can help us to assign meanings. More meaning, and fewer facts. That's the idea, anyway." Michael Crichton While storage, and retrieval capacities of electronic hardware are rapidly growing, there hasn't been a corresponding gain in human capacity. Better information processing can speed the flow of data, but is of little help in reading the printout, deciding what to do about it, or finding a higher mean- ing. Meaning requires time-consuming thought, and the pace of modern life works against affording us the time to think. Too much attention has been focused on computers and hardware and too little on the people who actu- ally use information in order to make sense of the world and do useful things for each other. In our television commercials, information leaps around offices on laser beams of colored light. This is the kind of information that engineers are rightly proud of: pulses and signals zipping along through
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