What with moon landings (but are they for real?), snow in Egypt (but is that for real?), the death from food-poisoning (remember, in 21st century Europe) of three family members so poor they had to live off food past its sell-by date, a frantically surveillanced and evermore secular global population intent on replacing an all-seeing God with an all-powerful NSA, a pope of apparently (serial) revolutionary leanings in the Vatican, and a Google, once of search, now investing in military robots (all examples of the latest news to hit my eyeballs this evening on Twitter), I truly wonder if – accompanying the exponential technological changes we’ve been living since the Industrial Revolution – we aren’t also going to experience an exactly similar exponential growth of news.
What happens when the sheer weight of news simply outruns our ability to keep pace? After all, those of us lucky enough to have a full complement of attributes have only twenty-four hours, two eyes, one brain and four limbs. However specialised we may choose to allow ourselves to become (imagine the idea of being a latterday Renaissance Man or Woman attracts us in no way whatsoever), even then, even with such a miserable and short-sighted giving-in to the silo effect, we cannot possibly follow the exponential news generated by exponential change. And if we cannot do so, neither can our news organisations. We may, of course, desperately attempt to chase the data and concepts down the line. We may manage to stay stuck to our four-inch mobile-phone screens as we tick-tack and swipe our way around evermore randomisingly inane streams of thought. But our productivity, our ability – on a regular and sustainable basis – to constructively convert ideas into technologies is surely being negatively affected. We are missing out, seriously, on the connections that once made the Industrial Revolution a revolution in the first place.
The Industrial Revolution was tough, cruel, magnificent and pointed all at the same time. It was essentially carried out for the greater glory of what we might term its protagonists. Not those humble souls whose repetitive work it was built upon. Rather, the “ideaologists” who – quite literally – thought up all those brilliant and shiny ideas which the inventions in question, their implications and their often dreadful pollutions were astonishingly developed into.
The inventors; the railroad barons; the scientists and engineers. The new Victorian nobility and aristocracy. The American millionaire-classes. In no lasting way, then, did it break down the hierarchy concentrated by wealth. Wealth reasserted itself, as – most clearly – it is doing today.
But some things did change a bit. Few of us would prefer to live in Victorian Britain. And perhaps this explains the prevalence amongst the obscenely rich, even in our times, of the belief that the trickle-down of such extreme wealth benefits those ant-like humans who have always crawled way below the stratosphere they occupy. If I had always lived so high up, I would see no difference between a terrace-inhabiting Victorian coal-miner and a humble teaching assistant, struggling nowadays at the social coalface of underprivileged inner-city schools. Both living with their noses to their relative grindstones; both with little perspective of consistently improving their lot; both with a place in society which suits the overprivileged. Both, in fact, equally distanced from the makers and shakers of their times.
(Even as all of us would continue to prefer the home appliances of 21st century living.)
So in this sense, I understand the very rich. Their comprehension of relative poverty, their belief that centuries wreak no real relative change, is supported by this kind of perception of reality. At least, by the reality they are able to perceive. Who cares that in the 21st century Europe I mention there are people who appear – out of the poverty these super-rich sanction – to be dying from the kind of second-rate food all of us would choose, given the option, to summarily discard?
This is why I fear exponential news. It gives those who would hide the truth a real advantage. For by doing so in a mass of figurative haystacks, they can live easily with their consciences at night. No lies have been told. No porkies have been sold. The truth has simply not been encountered.
You know, the NSA was right after all. It’s not the eyeballing of the information that really counts these days. Instead, it’s the ability we have (or not) to evaluate its importance.
So here is my plea to all you social-network trackers; all you professional investigators of random thought; all you government servants, all you advertising fiends, all you researchers of data processing and flow. If you find a reliable way to do this intelligently, please consider releasing it ASAP onto the open market for us currently hapless consumers. It will only serve to benefit a wider civilisation long-term.
Maybe even serve to rescue it from itself.
