Wednesday April 30, 2008
Information overload
Somewhere, flipping through a magazine, I saw an advertisement for Keno, an on-line gambling game.
The ad showed a flock of baseballs heading towards a batter, who was halfway through a mighty swing. The caption claimed that having a lot more balls in the air gives you a better chance of hitting one of them.
It may work for gambling, although I personally doubt it. It certainly doesn\’t work for baseball.
A batter can hit a ball because there is only one coming at him. His eyes focus on that single point. His brain calculates the trajectory of that point. His muscles swing the bat to intersect with that unique trajectory.
But fling a dozen balls at once at that batter, and his eye has nothing specific to focus on. The human eye is a remarkable instrument – it can see clearly only an area about the size of a quarter held at arms length. With a dozen balls arriving at one time, the eye doesn\’t know what to focus on. The brain, the muscles, cannot coordinate.
If a mighty swing actually connects with anything, it will certainly be pure chance.
Although the ad was about gambling, it identifies a social problem today. We don\’t have multiple baseballs flying at us. Instead, we have information.
We suffer from information overload.
Multitasking To receive this column regularly via e-mail, send a request to jimt@quixotic.ca. E-mail subscribers also get excerpts from correspondence about these columns. Please forward a copy of this column to anyone who might be interested in subscribing.
If you want to order my books, you can call 1-800-663-2775 in Canada, 1-800-328-0200 in the U.S., or order them on-line at the Wood Lake Books website.
For a lighter look at ethics, faith, and life, I recommend Ralph Milton\’s weekly e-newsletter Rumors. You can subscribe to it at the Wood Lake Books home page in Ralph Milton\’s Site, or by sending a note directly to ralphmilton@woodlake.com.
It\’s also worth pursuing Charlene Fairchild\’s United Online site. Another site worth visiting is David Keating\’s \”SeemslikeGod\” page.
The news is filled with situations I should get upset about. My mailbox is crammed with letters from worthy charities, all hoping I\’ll connect with them. Television programs spray commercials at me. And my e-mail overflows with unwanted junk.
No one just goes for a walk any more, it seems. They wear iPods or iPhones and their iLk. So that they can still get text messages, stock market bulletins, music, radio programs – yes, even phone calls — while they\’re out.
Multitasking works only as long as none of the tasks requires concentrated attention. But you cannot solve homelessness while researching hot tubs while practicing yoga while playing a five-manual pipe organ.
You know what it\’s like driving at night in a blizzard? After a while, all those snowflakes whirling at me in my headlights become hypnotic.
I feel the same way about today\’s information overload. It comes at me, until I am mesmerized, not by any particular piece of information, but simply by the swirling vortex of the blizzard itself.
The other day, a friend asked, “Didn\’t you get our invitation…?”
I actually wanted to be there. But if I received their invitation, I didn\’t recognize it. I must have junked along with all the rest of the spam.
The biblical prophet Elijah claimed he heard the voice of God in a “still, small voice” — not in the din of storm, the excitement of flame, or the terror of earthquake.
In our blizzard of information, it becomes increasingly hard to hear a still small voice – whether you call that the voice of God, of conscience, or of inner self.
To hit a home run, you have to deal with just one baseball at a time.
=====================================
Copyright © 2007 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
=====================================
PROMOTION PLUGS
