Perhaps my most important takeaway from Neil Portman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death is the information-action ratio:
How often does it occur that information provided you on morning radio or television, or in the morning newspaper, causes you to alter your plans for the day, or to take some action you would not otherwise have taken, or provides insight into some problem you are required to solve? […] Most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action.
Postman’s argument is that prior to the forms of modern communication—telegraph, radio, television—people lived in societies with a much lower information to action ratio. There is always more information than action, of course. But people living in the 18th century had a much lower ratio than we do today.
Today, in the developed world, anyway, we gorge ourselves on information. News, social media, podcasts, radio, YouTube, television. Many of us feast on information. But we have very little action to show for it.
Portman saw this coming over four decades ago:
For the first time in human history, people were faced with the problem of information glut, which means that simultaneously they were faced with the problem of a diminished social and political potency. You may get a sense of what this means by asking yourself another series of questions: What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and employment? What are you plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war?
Gulp.
The passage frightens me for two reasons: 1) those issues are still with us today! and 2) it illustrates the creeping sense of nihilism that I have felt about my own political agency in the past several years.
Of course, I can’t sit back and point fingers at the information-action ratio as the reason for my discontented political stance—but the overwhelming deluge of information coming at me every day has some part in it.
Taylor Coe 