Just ask Google: is it too easy?

Today, of course, a quick Google search would suffice. We can source anything immediately. Arguably, having so much instant information at our fingertips has made our jobs, especially as journalists, easier.

It certainly has if you are resigned to working alone at a screen. Yet those of us who remember how long it took to research anything at all may feel, as I do, that there is a benefit in gathering information slowly but very, very surely.

I still know a lot about the Spanish Civil War because I took time to read about it. Today, my memory simply disposes of most of the facts I grab from the internet seconds after I’ve used them.

I am no longer limited to writing on subjects that I really know about or have experience of because I can be an instant expert on anything at all.

Journalists used to be based on the ground at the heart of a situation. We used to mine deep for information. Now we just rummage through the nuggets at the surface, not bothering to return to the seam to glean richer spoils. And I think we are the poorer for it.

‘The data stream can’t be shut off’

The problem is that nowadays there is no excuse for being ill-informed, also known as behind the times. We all want to appear in the know, professionally and socially, about the latest development on any story (sport, gossip, cultural phenomenon, hard news from Syria – it doesn’t matter because it’s all being tweeted somewhere).

As Karl Taro Greenfield wrote in The New York Times recently: “The information is everywhere, a constant feed… The data stream can’t be shut off. It pours into our lives, a rising tide of words, facts, jokes, GIFs, gossip and commentary that threatens to drown us.

“Here we are, desperately paddling, making observations about pop culture memes, because to admit that we’ve fallen behind, that we don’t know what anyone is talking about, that we have nothing to say about each passing blip on the screen, is to be dead.”

Need-to-(appear to)-know

Indeed we’re all scurrying about seeking quick cheat sheets, like exam students relying on CliffsNotes, to pull through and never reading the book itself. And organizations are springing up to cater to our desperate need to appear in the know.

We are spattered daily with information that is too flimsy to sink into our memories and enhance our minds in any meaningful way.

Two years ago, I interviewed leading neuroscientist, Baroness Susan Greenfield CBE. She specializes in the physiology of the brain and is convinced that what she terms this ‘tsunami’ of information is harming our thought processes irreparably.

Baroness Greenfield, like me, grew up in an era when the television was the fulcrum of the home. “It was the equivalent to the piano in Victorian times, a source of shared family entertainment,” she says.

“At the same time, bedrooms tended to be unheated places where you slept and to which you were sent as a child as punishment. Now the home’s geography has entirely changed so children aren’t exiled to their bedrooms but retreat there from choice – and there’s usually some sort of screen in them.”

 

A library in your lap: the way we find information has changed dramatically

We can remember watching A Christmas Story at during the holidays and Johnny Carson with our parents. Now Netflix and Hulu offer such limitless choice that there’s no point gathering to watch anything. It’s all about ‘catch up’ – and what better way to describe our information-peppered lives?

We are all, like Alice, running in place just to keep up.

Susan Greenfield’s book, Mind Change, published last year, describes how the human brain has the superlative ability to adapt to its environment, a process known as ‘plasticity.’

Since the brain is proven to adapt to repeated patterns, she worries that hours spent absorbing and putting out information through screens is bound to have an adverse impact on our brains and memory.

Some people, like The Guardian’s Dean Burnett, says there is no evidence for her claims. But even aside from the empirical robustness of her thesis, a lot of what she says about our obsession with information makes sense.