NY Times: Overfeeding on Information?

The Times asks if Americans are becoming news-obsessed as we are in the middle of a very exciting election season as well as stuck in a hot economic mess. They begin with a story of a film production accountant with the last name “Lehman” (coincidence? please….) whose MSNBC-watching habits have gone so far as to elicit a pretty hilarious behavioral tick from her  5 year-old son Beckett.

YANA COLLINS LEHMAN, a film production accountant who lives in Brooklyn, knew something was amiss when her 5-year-old son, Beckett, started to announce to no one in particular, “I’m John McCain, and I approved this statement.”

Ms. Collins Lehman, 36, thought: “Oh my God, I’m watching too much news.”

But it is hard not to, she said, with the financial markets in meltdown, and that crisis increasingly intertwined with a frenzied presidential campaign entering the homestretch. This is why her own news diet has spiked to where it feels as if it’s taking over her life. And maybe her son’s, too.

“It’s such a drain on productivity,” Ms. Collins Lehman said. “It’s a compulsion.”

And of course the NY Times looks to a sociologist to ask about news-compulsion.

ERIC KLINENBERG, a sociology professor at New York University, said people are unusually transfixed by news of the day because the economic crisis in particular seems to reach into every corner of their lives. Usually, he added, people can compartmentalize their lives into different spheres of activity, such as work, family and leisure. But now, “those spheres are collapsing into each other.”

I do not buy Klinenberg’s veiled economism but I do see where his view stems from. More philosophically, we would consider his statement about the ability to rationalize and compartmentalize social phenomena parallel to what existential philosophers call “ontological security.” In other words, everything is in its right place. Or as the phrase goes, “everything is everything.” But as of late, during periods of crisis or social transformation, as the classical sociologist Durkheim believed, we experience a spike in “anomie” or normelessness. Or, as the great George Constanza put it: “Worlds are COLLIDING!!!!!“(Warning: The link is actually in Spanish overdub, which I find to be extra-hilarious.)

But beyond the existential argument, I find another area that the Times reports on to be far more interesting, that of what Pierre Bourdieu called “cultural capital.”

For others, information serves as social currency. Crises, like soap operas or sports teams, can provide a serial drama for people to talk about and bond over, said Kenneth J. Gergen, a senior research psychologist at Swarthmore College who studies technology and culture. “It gives us the stuff that keeps the community together,” he said. And for those whose social circles think of knowledge as power, having the latest information can also enhance status, Dr. Gergen said. “If you can just say what somebody said yesterday, that doesn’t do the trick,” he said.

This is something you and I have all experienced, which is the necessity of “one-up-manship” that occurs at all social gatherings especially in situation in which the person who does not know how to explain a derivative and its importance in the current global financial meltdown is looked upon as lacing social currency, in other words, culturally poor. It is most likely the case that we modulate between the one who is disdained and the one who disdains.

However, I find the tragic human alienation narrative that the Times story paints is not only a bit “precious” but also empirically iffy in one sense. Information can become a compulsion but it can also, and is in many places in the world, a hard-to-find commodity. And in many ways, I think information-in-use, that is not the concept of information but information as it is used socially and other wise, exists as something that is ready-at-hand, not something is overloading humans’ ability to use it. What I mean to say is that the Times report lacks an understanding of information distribution. It assumes that because all of this information exists in our technomediated worlds, that it is used by everyone at once. It is quite clear that people do not use one media at a time; I, along with most of you all, watch TV regularly with laptop close by. Nevertheless, information, especially news, must be accessed through iPhone, TV sets, and computers. It does not land on the doorstop of your consciousness with the help of a news stork. All of this to say, the Times paints the portrait of the overfed individual who obsessively watches the news and goes to Huffington Post by him or herself. This is a very old story from the 1950s in which the individual loses his or her individuality through the colonization of his or her mind by technology (See various books by Riesman, Lasch, Adorno and Horkheimer, Jacques Ellul, and more recently Neil Postman). But this is not exactly an accurate picture of the conditions under which information is distributed–sent out and received.

How many times have you sat around the TV with roommates, friends, significant others and had a burning question which was quite easily answered by someone grabbing the computer or whipping out (pause..haha, had to do it.) their iPhone?

X-posted at Human Potential.