Where is the meaning in information?
--> Is Mujiarso - Maximillian Aug/Sep 09
My professor in print media communication began his first class by asking, what is the meaning of information?
After fielding answers from several students, the professor offered an illustration. Imagine we are cast away on an island with no map. We are looking for a specific location, so we just ask people we meet on our way. The first answer we get might ease a little of our confusion. But one answer can never satisfy us, so we ask another person, and our confusion is cleared up a little more. After we ask a third person, our confusion completely disappears, replaced by decisiveness. My professor concluded that information reduces our confusion about things.
That was, of course, before the internet has become so common, when information did not fly around the world with the same speed as today and before Twitter and its "140-character questions" threatened to put newspapers completely out of business. My college library subscribed to almost all the national and regional newspapers, plus weekly magazines and tabloids, which were exploding in numbers following the easing of press restrictions.
But even though we pored over all those newspapers and magazines, we're still were not sated. We thirsted for information. Now, in the era of social media networking, information comes so quickly, although in form of incomplete collages, it seems that we are sometimes drowning in the stuff.
I was at an airport waiting for my plane when I heard about Michael Jackson's death. The news came from my travel partner, who is the kind of person who is constantly on her BlackBerry, updating her Twitter and Facebook accounts. Me, I'm a bit old school when it comes to vacations and prefer to block out the outside world. I had turned off my mobile phone, though it doesn't actually have an application to connect with the internet. But now I was haunted by this brief news flash about Jackson's death. Was the news really true? How did he die so suddenly? What was the cause?
Information has become cheap; it comes to us with unbelievable speed, but what do we get from it? Information in many ways has been transformed into "bad knowledge", which only serves to stoke our anxiousness and feelings of uncertainty. A friend of mine often listens to traffic reports on the radio while trying to navigate Jakarta's traffic jams. He flips through the stations trying to get the latest information. He'll panic when he hears of a traffic jam up ahead on his route and make a detour, only to hear on another station of trouble ahead on his new route. Finally, his time runs out and he ends up stuck in traffic with everyone else. How did we come to such a situation?
On the plane, my friend was reading the newspaper that had been distributed by the flight attendant. After a while, I noticed that she was looking decidedly nervous.
I peeked at the headline to see what had caused her to lose her holiday mood and discovered that two swine flu cases had been detected in the location where we were headed.
People going on holiday usually look for as much information as possible on the place they are headed, from weather reports to hotel room rates. But too much information usually end up leaving us confused and anxious. Because of one story in the paper about swine flu and a 140-character message from Twitter about the death of Michael Jackson, my friend spent her whole holiday in the room watching TV.
"I need the whole story," she said.
I'm not sorry I went on holiday with her, nor do I blame Michael Jackson for dying at the same time as my vacation. It's useless. What I can do is make sure that my next holiday is better. How? Ignore all the small stuff. And this is not only applicable to holidays, but the rest of our lives. Why do we have to feel like we're out of the loop, somehow incomplete, if we don't know which celebrity is getting a divorce? It's too much information, and its taking over our lives.
Living in an era where information is just so cheap and everywhere, we more often than not run around trying to keep up to date with everything, thinking our lives are better for being informed, when in fact the opposite is true. If you want to make life better, turn off your TV, only skim through the newspaper and, well, ignore blogs. Escape to some secluded beach or quiet island, and leave your BlackBerry at home. Listen to the stories of the locals, engage in some "real" conversation, an art form that has all but disappeared in the era of one-sided, noisy and authoritative information.
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