Today’s communication technology has inundated us with more information than we can possibly need or want. All day news TV channels, Internet websites and chat rooms, and hundreds of specialized papers, magazines and journals provide us with more information in a day than we could ingest in a lifetime.
I feel so buried under the constant barrage of detailed information that I am prepared to enter a monastery just to escape. I can’t handle it anymore. I am more than full of information; I am supersaturated! There is no room for even one more tabloid headline or one special news report or one more eBay bargain.
A television weather report can be overwhelming. A satellite photo can show me the cloud cover over North America and a rotating globe can inform me instantly of the weather in Perth, Paris or Pittsburg. I know where the jet steam is flowing and can get constant hurricane and typhoon updates in a split second. I can go to the Internet and find the temperature, humidity, time of sunrise and sunset, barometric pressure and wind speed in any city in the world from my home. I don’t need to know all of that. I just want to know if it is going to be nice tomorrow or if it is going to rain.
If I watch a baseball game on TV or on my computer, the nonstop chatter of the color commentators brutally assaults me. All I want to know is the batter’s batting average and perhaps how many home runs he has hit this year. Instead, I will be informed that Billy Ballbanger is batting .256 if he is playing a day game on natural turf and using a maple bat, but his average is .286 if the pitcher is left handed, can throw a 86mph slider and likes to eat lasagna before the game. Sports statistics have become so picayune that they bury the listener in so much minutia that he often does not even know the score of the game. Enough already!
News from the entertainment world is equally meaningless and irrelevant. I don’t care if Jennifer Aniston has been dating Ryan Seaweed or if Tom Cruise’s latest movie grossed three billion dollars more in the first week than Mission Impossible or not. I don’t care if Madonna is going to call her next child Mustard or Fuzzy. The totally insignificant information that leaks, spills or is dumped out of Hollywood is about as important as the name of George W’s barber. Abolish Hollywood gossip and speculation!
The Golden Garbage Can Award for total overkill in the Information Supersaturation Services goes to every political program and commentator. The recent US election coverage divulged more useless information, such as the voting habits of illegal aliens from Mexico, than anyone could possible fathom. Most television political commentators create an impression that their comments are based on a rich academic background relative to the topic under discussion. In fact, many of them are simply television creations whose job is to sell controversy and increase the number of viewers by becoming despicable ‘homers’ or opinionated snobs.
I basically need to know if tomorrow will be nice weather, if my Cleveland Indians won, and if there is a major ‘new’ world or local event of which I should be aware. I need this information once a day and it shouldn’t take more than a minute of my time. My supersaturated mind, although it has been regularly blown apart, just can’t take it any more!
How about you?
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