Information Indigestion

In David Denby’s Great Books on page 36 he writes about following stories on CNN, watching updates even when awakened in the middle of the night. He concludes “the business of being ‘informed’ could be nightmarish...” He compares it to feeling like “a ball rolling over and over, or the hands of a clock coming back to the same point.” This is a fair representation, I think, of being so saturated and bombarded with information all the time that there is little genuine reflection. We have come to mistake information for knowledge -- and worse yet, for wisdom. Undigested information is neither, and too much information can give one a severe case of indigestion. That is one problem with the Internet. It is a wonderful source of information, but it’s too easy to become infatuated with the frantic flow of information and neglect reflection.