Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut

This spirited call to action for the digital age does not so much tell how to survive the tidal wave of true and false information, anecdote, raw data and sheer noise that the author sees roaring down the information highway as it points in undisguised outrage at the problem itself. The final few pages offer some simplified solutions: turn the TV off; skip hourly news updates; junk your beeper; resist upgrading your computer; get government to limit the amount of raw information it releases; reduce the amount of data you yourself disseminate. That last point may sound a bit surprising coming from a journalist who's a fellow emeritus at the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center at Columbia University, but Shenk--an unabashed computer enthusiast--sees us drowning in information that has become so commonplace it no longer seems valuable. He claims that the majority of American workers are paid to ""churn out data,"" and that the result is intellectual and emotional chaos. The new vulgarity, he says, comes not from loose morals, as advocates of family virtues claim, but from the desire to get attention amid the constant din. Computers in the classroom, he claims, are producing lower test scores, and the mass of unedited data is causing an increase in specialization, compartmentalization and fragmentation. The Internet and the World Wide Web are not bringing us together, but turning us into parochial specialists. This, he suggests, may be part of a Republican (or at least a Newt Gingrich) agenda of decentralization. He also warns about the loss of privacy. Shenk is an effective polemicist, but he seems better at seeing trends and sniffing out problems than at finding realistic solutions. Line drawings not seen by PW. (Apr.)