Information-Action Ratio

Every now and then you come across a passage in a book that just begs to be quoted verbatim. I just found one such passage that "sank my battleship" as it were. From Neil Postman, Amusing ourselves to death, pp. 67-8.

As Thoreau implied, telegraphy made relevance irrelevant. The abundant flow of information had very little or nothing to do with those to whom it was addressed; that is, with any social or intellectual context in which their lives were embedded. Coleridge's famous line about water everywhere without a drop to drink may serve as a metaphor of a decontextualized information environment: In a sea of information, there was very little of it to use. A man in Maine and a man in Texas could converse, but not about anything either of them knew or cared very much about. The telegraph may have made the country into "one neighborhood," but it was a peculiar one, populated by strangers who knew nothing but the most superficial facts about each other.

Since we live today in just such a neighborhood (now sometimes called a "global village"), you may get a sense of what is meant by context-free information by asking yourself the following question: 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? For most of us, news of the weather will sometimes have such consequences; for investors, news of the stock market; perhaps an occasional story about a crime will do it, if by chance the crime occurred near where you live or involved someone you know. But most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action. This fact is the principal legacy of the telegraph: By generating an abundance of irrelevant information, it dramatically altered what may be called the "information-action ratio." 

In other words, everything I write about, so much of what we all busy ourselves arguing over... does not matter one wit. Postman continues to argue that the irrelevance of information makes us impotent, the possibility of effective action to address problems is in practical terms... nil. Given this practical reality I suppose my job as blogger needs a reassessment; history and national issues are important... somehow,  but I and others interested in these things need to construct a new defense of why and how what has happened before or what happens in Washington D.C. matters. This is certainly not impossible, Seventy years ago Reinhold Niebuhr built from scratch a defense of democracy that went beyond the theoretical or abstract and corrected for just this kind of deficiency. New Left intellectuals and activists tried to redress the balance of the information-action ratio by promoting "participatory democracy" and since then those of us interested in justice have attempted to increase the potency of citizens and make information relevant again. It is a hard road, just look how easily so many 'wingers have been sucked into a completely imaginary world where information is not simply irrelevant but useless. However the right clings to its fantasy tenaciously and if we are not careful the Daily Me can become just as dangerous to the left.