October 28, 1990

EVERYWHERE you turn, someone is touting the computer as the catalyst for the dawning of the Age of Information, the beginning of a time when knowledge is our currency, not goods, and that somehow, all the information being generated today is going to contribute to a great leveling of societal classes so that everyone from the richest to the poorest will have access to all the information they need to live healthy and productive lives.

This belief is somewhat akin to trying to teach a pig to sing. Society is terribly remiss in how it disseminates information and subsequently, how it expects us, its citizens, to assimilate it, and the electronic age isn’t changing the basic paradigm — it’s just putting it on a chip. Despite the fact that I was raised Catholic, I do not find it ennobling to do penance for a juicy business trip to Europe by opening two crates of mail instead of one upon my return. Nor do I see how the vast amount of spew that I receive — both in my personal and professional life — will enrich me or add to the base of knowledge that keeps me moving forward as a human being or in my career.

That’s because there is a strong tendency, especially in the mostly unenlightened high-tech industry, to confuse information with knowledge. I wish I could remember the T.S. Eliot quote about how information obscures knowledge — it’s buried in a stack of paper somewhere — but the point is, you can drown in product features and still not have any relevant “knowledge” about what something is used for and why.

I was drowning before I left for Europe, and in a moment of prescience stuck an ancient copy of “Shockwave Rider” by John Brunner into my briefcase for the flight. This is the book, you’ll recall, that inspired the infamous Robert Morris tapeworm that brought the Internet to its knees a year or so ago. I found it equally inspirational, but in a different way.

In “Shockwave Rider,” the electronic network or the “net,” as it’s called, is a sinuous paranoid nightmare come true, to which all telephones, computers, credit-card readers, etc., are connected. Brunner’s “net” does what a great many of us are clamoring for today — it provides access to all kinds of necessary information (though of course the government exercises a certain degree of control, for your own good) and services, essentially connecting everything to everything else.

People, forced to interact with the net for access to information and money, are easily tracked via those interactions. (Actually, look at your latest Visa bill — it’s already a pretty accurate record of what you’ve been doing lately, isn’t it?) As a result, the tentacles of the net in “Shockwave Rider” have insinuated themselves into every crevice of human society and thought.

Today, although prodigious in their capacity for spawning information, electronic networks such as the Internet still don’t generate the crushing weight that today’s biggest offline high-tech octopus, the international postal service, does. While in Europe, I did an informal survey of many of my peers, some of the most highly regarded journalists in the business, who receive all the very same pieces of junk mail that I do.

I asked them how they handled it. “I don’t even look at it, I just throw it away,” said one. “I don’t open it unless I’m interested in the return address,” said another. “Anything with a mailing label gets tossed,” was probably the harshest reply, but I believe such responses are healthy.

In “Shockwave Rider,” Brunner recognized that dealing with the information snowball was going to be a big problem and dubbed it “overloading” — where people, surrounded by “a plethora of opportunity . . . dither and lapse into anxiety neurosis.” Labeling it, however, doesn’t solve how to keep up in a world where data multiplies at rates beyond the exponential. If you’re in a business where the quality of the information you receive — and the speed at which you receive it — is what your job is hinged on, the thought of throwing away 99 percent of the influx seems tantamount to slitting your professional wrists.

But you know, you’ve just got to learn to draw the line. If information increases exponentially, how do you figure you’ll keep up a year from now? It’s not possible. For me, drawing the line means not opening two crates of mail, tightening my filter so that I control my information intake. It’s intimidating at first, and feels risky — what if something slips through the cracks? — but ultimately, what if something does? There’s plenty more where that came from.

In “Shockwave Rider,” one of their society’s controversial historians looked at the problem and summed it up rather nicely: “If you want to go faster, go slower.” I’m trying it — going slower, getting more done, unplugging a little from my own “net.” And you know what? It works.