The End of Patience: Cautionary Notes on the Information Revolution David Shenk . - Indiana University Press, 1999 - Review - book review

Matrix: The Magazine for Leaders in Education, Sept, 2000 by John G. Norman

The End of Patience: Cautionary Notes on the Information Revolution David Shenk (Indiana University Press, 1999) Reviewed by John G. Norman

Like many of the great critics, David Shenk is a thorough-going snob and a cultural conservative. He would like us to have taste and the ability to retreat to our studies to consider the world carefully and cautiously, preferably via a good book that has distilled the hubbub of the onrushing dataflow. His best moments occur when he is helping us decide which of two paths to take--one low, a road taken by those who are wallowing in the new rush of information, the other high, occupied by the enlightened, who he hopes will exercise a certain skepticism about emergent technologies.

In his slim new collection of essays, The End of Patience: Cautionary Notes on the Information Revolution, Shenk ranges over a wide spectrum of provocative topics, from the massive proliferation of video images and animated Web sites to considerations of how children are now educated, and how they may soon be affected by biotechnological discoveries and products. In each essay his caution is the same: slow down and consider the human values implied by the new technology.

In many ways this is a book about how one controls one's own techno-lust and techno-envy. How can we retreat from a world that has attached such value to the fastest, the smallest, the most efficient? He asks us to ask ourselves if the rush of information is worth the reinvention of ourselves in order to keep up. In the 1997 essay that suggested for the book, he asks: "Tell me: How slow is your computer modem? Are you still crawling around with a 2400 baud? Or are you puttering along with a 9600? Perhaps you have a 14.4, which for a while seemed fast--until you saw someone else's 28.8 shoveling data twice as quickly. Don't envy your 28.8 friends too much, though--his other pal just bought a 56K. The guy with the 56K modem logs on to the Net and starts drooling when he sees an advertisement for 128K. Does this ever end?

"What if I told you that there's no such thing as a fast modem, and there never will be? That's because quickness has disappeared from our culture. We now only experience degrees of slowness. With conveniences like the fax machine, e-mail, FedEx, beepers, and so on, we've managed to compress time to such an extent that we're now painfully aware of every second that we wait for anything."

How do we emerge from this vicious cycle? Shenk says "You stop losing the unwinnable rat race as soon as you decide to stop running in it."

This short parable from Shenk reveals a crucial argument in his book that is not so easy to spot on first reading. Though the book positions itself as one about technology and the glut of information, it's really about consumer culture, greed, and privatization. Thus Shenk's true target is a world in which we are saturated with corporate messages that interrupt and void our decision-making processes. The real problem, then, is not our saturation by information, but our saturation by corporate information that short-circuits our own ability to make judgments about new things and experiences.

This short-circuiting of our critical abilities by corporations is nowhere more clear than in his essay titled "Ph.D., Inc.," which was a cover story for a 1999 issue of The Nation. Shenk documents the shift in the financing of medical research from the public domain to the private. Against the argument that the marketplace is the ultimate consumer watchdog, Shenk reminds the reader of some recent finding by the New England Journal of Medicine regarding the authors of research on a new calcium channel blocker (a drug said to reduce the risk of heart attack).

The NEJM survey found that 96 percent of the authors who favored a calcium-channel blocker had a financial relationship with the manufacturers. If these published articles are this profoundly polluted by conflicting interests, how can the public ever sort out what's of value in the information glut?

As I have said, Shenk is a snob who would like to recommend to us strategies for rising above the constant interruptions of messages with hidden purposes. But his essay on private interests in medical research closes with this bald statement of statistics. In other words, there is little that the informed citizen can do, except be very worried. Of course, Shenk suggests that there is a place for government regulation of such research; but as far as the individual is concerned, it seems that removing one's self from the glut will do nothing to ameliorate the distortions of the market.

Excepting a short epilogue, the book's closing essay is an homage to David Macaulay's book The New Way Things Work. Shenk is relieved that we can settle back into our easy chairs and read this book that explains the inner workings of our technological world, from the incline plane to the digital domain. But Shenk himself has raised the stakes so significantly with the essays in his book that I can't see how we can stop running in the unwinnable race. If we don't find a way to win this race, then we will be ever more frequently subjected to information that has no author, no history, and no ethics.