{ Thursday, February 14, 2008 }
I lifted these excerpts wholesale from the blog of Michael Sippey, I'm not ashamed to say, who I've known since 1996, originally because he had a blog, or what later came to be known as a blog -- we called them zines then, or online diaries, or personal web pages -- but which was always smart and funny and fun, though it's changed names and URLs since then. He consistently finds the nuggets buried in the noise.
On that subject, and in this instance, Michael highlights the introductory essay that David Foster Wallace wrote for The Best American Essays, 2007 Edition, after much time spent reading, for the sake of selecting the pieces for inclusion in the book
...Or let's not even mention the amount of research, background, cross-checking, corroboration, and rhetorical parsing required to understand the cataclysm of Iraq, the collapse of congressional oversight, the ideology of neoconservatism, the legal status of presidential signing statements, the political marriage of evangelical Protestantism and corporatist laissez-faire ... There's no way. You'd simply drown. We all would. It's amazing to me that no one much talks about this -- about the fact that whatever our founders and framers thought of as a literate, informed citizenry can no longer exist, at least not without a whole new modern degree of subcontracting and dependence packed into what we mean by 'informed.'
I remember reading somewhere that in Lincoln's day, the entirety of information one literate person encountered in his lifetime was about the same as what you now find in two or three Sunday editions of The New York Times. I've more or less given up trying to grok everything, and have started to tout the benefits of being ill informed.
LINK | 7:21 PM | TB
Interesting, but the bit about literate people of the nineteenth century not encountering more than two or three Sunday Times is crap. A lot of people *wrote* more than that, far more. Benjamin Franklin's papers run to 48 volumes. Dickens published a novel pretty much annually in the 1840s and 1850s.
You might enjoy Neil Postman's Building a Bridge to the 18th Century, a fantastic book about pre-electronic literacy, among other things.
John | February 18, 2008 12:21 AMYes John, but the person I was quoting was talking about the *average* literate person, not the exceptionally well-read person.
Caterina | February 18, 2008 3:49 AMLower levels of literacy bring the average down, but so what? Table stakes got raised in the intervening 150 years. I can only assume that things like tacit or social knowledge were simply not included in whatever statistic gave rise to that factoid, yet these things continue to form the bulk of what we know without actually being "information". Sounds like DFW is just overwhelmed.
Michal Migurski | February 24, 2008 1:07 AM"So what" is that:
"a rate of consumption which tends to level everything out into an undifferentiated mass of high-quality description and trenchant reflection that becomes both numbing and euphoric, a kind of Total Noise that's also the sound of our U.S. culture right now,"
specifically its description as: "an undifferentiated mass of high-quality description"
comes as close as anything I've read to describing the condition that I find myself in, far more than "information overload" or "society of the spectacle," for example. It's not that I *have* to keep up with all this material; it's that the bulk of what I read is so good and interesting and high-quality that I really *want* to, but I can't, and the goodness just keeps on comin'.
And hat people as well-connected as DFW and CEF are would even begin to entertain the idea that it's simply not possible to be as "well read" as they'd like to be, and that there's some other way to operate, is interesting on the face of it.
Eric Rodenbeck | February 25, 2008 9:08 AM{ Post a comment }
Information known before others is advantage in any time and any situation. The fact that information moves far more quickly than it did in Lincoln's time doesn't change this truth. However, the idea that one might "know the world" was as quaint in the Enlightenment as it is today. No one person knew the world then and none knows it now. If anything, it's probably a person today who has a better shot at knowledge than one then, because we have a shorter path to the information that can enlighten.
Despite all that, to know is not to understand. And we live in an age full of knowledge yet meager in understanding.
knownothing | February 14, 2008 9:26 PM