Techno-Cultural Interaction and the Fear of Information

Style, Summer, 1999 by R. L. Rutsky

Information Overload

Today, we are often told, we live not simply in an age of information, but in an age of excessive information. The amount and availability of information seem to be increasing at an exponential rate. We feel that our entire world is moving, changing, mutating, at an accelerated pace. Our interactions with this world of information seem plagued by an increasing sense that we cannot keep up, can't take it all in, that we are being overwhelmed by information, deluged by data: the sense of an "information overload."

One of the first attempts to represent this kind of information overload appears in Ted Mooney's 1981 novel, Easy Travel to Other Planets. There, Mooney describes "A Case of Information Sickness" in the following terms:

On his way to Diego's, Jeffrey discovers a woman harmed by information excess. All the symptoms are present: bleeding from the nose and ears, vomiting, deliriously disconnected speech, apparent disorientation, and the desire to touch everything . [...] A small crowd has collected around her, listening to her complicated monologue: Birds of Prey Cards, sunspot souffle, Antarctic unemployment. Jeffrey hesitates. I've never seen one so far gone, he thinks. But, judging her young enough to warrant hope, he gently takes the rubber mat from the woman, unrolls it upon the pavement, and helps her to assume the memory-elimination posture. After a minute, the bleeding stops. "I was on my way to dance class," she says to him, still running her ravening fingers over his leather coat sleeve, "when suddenly I was dazzled. I couldn't tell where one thing left off and the next began." [...] Jeffrey explains that he believes information sickness, like malaria, recurs unpredictably. (34)

The symptoms in this case are remarkably similar to those in a case of schizophrenic experience cited by Fredric Jameson to illustrate certain characteristics of postmodernity:

Suddenly, as I was passing the school, I heard a German song; the children were having a singing lesson. I stopped to listen, and at that instant a strange feeling came over me, a feeling hard to analyze but akin to something I was to know too well later--a disturbing sense of unreality. It seemed to me that I no longer recognized the school, it had become as large as a barracks; the singing children were prisoners, compelled to sing. [...] At the same time my eye encountered a field of wheat whose limits I could not see. The yellow vastness, dazzling in the sun, bound up with the song of children imprisoned in the smooth stone school-barracks, filled me with such anxiety that I broke into sobs. (27)

In each "case," the experience is described as a form of illness and is characterized by similar symptoms: a sense of discontinuity and unreality, a disorienting dazzlement, the inability to distinguish boundaries or limits. For Jameson, the incident he describes is emblematic of a postmodern breakdown of temporality, which "releases the present from all the activities and intentionalities that might focus it," so that it

suddenly engulfs the subject with undescribable vividness, a materiality of perception properly overwhelming. [. . .] This present [. . .] comes before the subject with heightened intensity, bearing a mysterious charge of affect, here described in the negative terms of anxiety and loss of reality, but which one could just as well imagine in the positive terms of euphoria, a high, an intoxicatory or hallucinogenic intensity.

Jameson's description of this overwhelming experience seems extremely similar to Mooney's "case of information sickness." Indeed, this connection is strengthened when Jameson goes on to cite the example of Nam June Paik's multiple-screen video installations, suggesting that viewers used to a more traditional aesthetic are "bewildered by this discontinuous variety," while "the postmodernist viewer [. . .] is called upon to do the impossible, namely to see all the screens at once, in their radical and random difference." Thus, although Jameson views these experiences not as evidence of some informational surplus, but of a breakdown of temporal narratives and spatial continuities in postmodernity, the resulting sense of an overwhelming, heightened intensity appears to be the same.

Jameson's analysis in fact suggests that any notion of a temporal and spatial breakdown is inseparable from a concept of informational excess. N. Katherine Hayles has suggested as much in her discussion of the "denaturing" of language, context, and time in postmodernity--a denaturing that involves separating information from meaning, context and history (265-95). On the one hand, this sort of denaturing or breakdown of a priori categories or "metanarratives" inevitably frees the elements within these categories, producing the effect of more, and more random, information. Yet, at the same time, the proliferation of information, and of channels of information, itself tends to overwhelm traditional unifying perspectives or narratives. This self-replicating process therefore results in the sense of an ever increasing amount of information, a sense that is made obvious in Jean Baudrillard's observation that "We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning" (79).