Chapter 7 Forward Thinking, Composing Cyberspace

Forward Thinking about Chapter 7

    At the dawn of the 21st century, few people in the world's affluent countries are immune from information overload -- the feeling of being overwhelmed by information from a variety of sources. TV and radio are ubiquitous, movies and videotapes are more popular than ever, and book publishing is still thriving. TV is probably more to blame than personal computers for a steady decline in the readership of daily newspapers -- but computers are increasingly a major source of information overload as more and more people conduct business, do research, communicate, find entertainment, and even get their news online.
    In the Cathy Guisewite cartoon (Composing Cyberspace, p. 290), the vehicle of information overload suffered by protagonist Cathy seems, through the first six panels, to be her computer screen. She appears besieged by the steady stream of "instant information" on every possible subject. When she marvels in the sixth panel that all this information is available "though one tiny phone line," our suspicion that she's connected to the Internet by a modem is confirmed. The surprise of the last panel, of course, is that she's been talking to her mother on the telephone, not surfing the Net.
    Although regular readers of Cathy know that her relationship with her mother is ambivalent, Cathy's apparent relief that her mother could perform the same functions as the busiest communication network in history dramatizes a larger anxiety many people feel about the information age. The Internet is scary, while mothers are, if sometimes difficult, at least something familiar and nonthreatening. Perhaps, Guisewhite may be suggesting, the condition of information overload isn't as new a phenomenon as we think. Or perhaps we should be even more worried about Cathy's mother, who's evidently as overwhelming as a one-person Internet!
    In any case, most people would agree that getting advice from one's mother is very different from getting advice from strangers on the Internet. But Cathy's summary of the barrage of information she receives would seem to describe both "media" -- mothers and the Net -- equally well. How much does the medium, and the context in which information comes to us, affect the content and our interpretation of that content? How do we sort through all this information to find what is useful for us? Put another way, what's the difference between information and knowledge? If information consists of separate, unconnected pieces of data -- and knowledge means the application of selected information in a particular context, which requires some judgment, analysis, or interpretation -- then how do new media affect the process of knowledge-making?
    Evidently we are not going easily into the Information Age, not without a good deal of anxiety and nostalgia, and this chapter explores some of that anxiety as well as some of the promise of new information technologies. In a short story first published in 1941, Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges imagines a future in which print and book technology is taken to its logical extreme. Everyone lives in library cubicles with uniform shelves of books that, taken all together, contain all possible knowledge, yet the information available to any given individual is random; civilization appears to have reached a dead-end. Likewise, but with a focus on today's electronic information, humorist Dave Barry offers "proof that civilization is doomed" in the form of sites on the World Wide Web that he finds especially silly or absurd. Literary critic Sven Birkerts, who fears the consequences of declining interest in books, makes a more sober and intellectual argument that the transition from print media to electronic media is "reweaving the entire social and cultural web" in negative ways.
    Concluding this chapter, Shyamala Reddy and Brenda Laurel offer more hopeful visions of how the search for knowledge is being reshaped by emerging technologies. Reddy, though she believes that books are here to stay, argues that new media such as CD-ROMs, electronic books, and hypertext offer compelling advantages in the ways they make information available. Laurel, a virtual reality (VR) researcher and video game designer, suggests that VR and other emerging media "open new possibilities for experience," especially for artistic expression. If such new art forms are designed thoughtfully, according to Laurel, the result could even be "a quantum leap in human evolution."
    Before you read these selections, you might think first about your own impressions of new media and your own experiences with information overload; for example, consider the following:
    1. How barraged or overwhelmed with information do you feel? What kinds and range of information are you exposed to in your daily life? From what various sources and media does this information arrive?
    2. Do you know how to readily find information that you need for school, work, or other purposes? What media do you find most useful for finding that information and putting it to use?
    3. How much do you read outside of school or work? What do you read? How much TV do you watch? How much time do you spend playing video games or using computers? Do you think you read books, paper magazines, and newspapers less or more than the generations preceding or following you?
    4. If you've ever experienced the same piece of work or similar content in two or more different media -- for example, a movie based on a book you've read, paper and CD-ROM versions of a textbook, or the paper and Web versions of Composing Cyberspace -- consider how each medium affects your experience of the work.
    5. Talk to someone who's tried a virtual reality (VR) game at an arcade or someone familiar with the holodeck, a fictional VR environment from the "Star Trek" TV series. What are your impressions, from these reports or other reading you've done, of the current state and possibilities for VR?
    6. If you have access to a computer lab, classroom, or networked computers equipped with electronic discussion software, discuss with fellow readers any of the issues raised here.

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