A high-fiber media diet
I’ve often complained on this blog, perhaps to the point of appearing crochety, that the ever increasing pace of modern life makes it difficult to find time to reflect or think deeply about any issue. For scholars like myself, this is a serious problem: we are employed to think critically about an issue, come up with an hypothesis, and test it. While modern communications technology can greatly facilitate the testing of hypotheses, it sometimes inhibits the first two processes, by creating an atmosphere of near constant distractions. Recently, I’ve been thinking about my ingestion of electronic information from the perspective of its signal-to-noise ratio (due in part to my reading of an excellent book by Nassim Taleb). Generally, the more frequently updates sources of information contain no more total signal than the more sparsely updates sources. For example, the entire day’s broadcast on CNN contains no more information than a quality print newspaper; the news has been stretched to fit the available time, vastly decreasing the signal-to-noise ratio.
The strategy that most of my academically-inclined friends have adopted is therefore quite rational. In contrast to the “drop out” mentality of the 1960s in the US, my friends and I are all highly connected- part of the day. In essence, we all connect to the Internet and digest high signal-to-noise ratio information from sources we trust, and then physically unplug our Ethernet cables to get some deep thinking done. It’s fortifying, a sort of high fiber, low fat media diet. In an odd way though, it is still occasionally equivalent to “dropping out” of mainstream culture. I realized this recently when a good friend on a similar media diet asked, in all seriousness, who Jonbenet Ramsey was. In a sense, I was totally envious of her- at least she’s not wasting her synapses thinking about it- but it also made me realize how she (and I) have consciously chosen to be willfully ignorant of certain parts of American culture.
The strategy that most of my academically-inclined friends have adopted is therefore quite rational. In contrast to the “drop out” mentality of the 1960s in the US, my friends and I are all highly connected- part of the day. In essence, we all connect to the Internet and digest high signal-to-noise ratio information from sources we trust, and then physically unplug our Ethernet cables to get some deep thinking done. It’s fortifying, a sort of high fiber, low fat media diet. In an odd way though, it is still occasionally equivalent to “dropping out” of mainstream culture. I realized this recently when a good friend on a similar media diet asked, in all seriousness, who Jonbenet Ramsey was. In a sense, I was totally envious of her- at least she’s not wasting her synapses thinking about it- but it also made me realize how she (and I) have consciously chosen to be willfully ignorant of certain parts of American culture.
