What we're missing

The Age of Missing Information is an informal non-scientific experiment of sorts by author Bill McKibben.

He wondered one day, in this "information age" we live in where all of this knowledge is supposedly at our proverbial fingertips, are we really any better off. So, for his little experiment, he compared and contrasted his feelings and experiences of spending a full 24 hours off, alone, camping in the woods and mountains near his home with the wonderful knowledge-base that is a 24 hour cycle of cable television.

I'll elaborate here on the TV side of things. This was not sitting around for a day straight, flipping through the channels. With the help of friends, Bill recorded EVERY channel's 24 hours of programming for all 93 channels of the cable network he had access to. At the time it was one of the largest cable markets in the U.S. He then waded through the resulting 2000+ hours of quality programming looking for the information.

This book is in some senses a bit dated. He wrote this back in 1990, and as many can surely attest, 93 channels is some quaint throwback to when cable wasn't that great, as now there are packages with channels in the hundreds. Additionally, now we have a much larger internet presence and all the "information" offered there. By the same token, this book captures many truths that still hold true today, and perhaps even moreso. People have become largely disconnected with nature. We no longer focus on the good of the community because TV (and certainly now the internet as well) tell us with brutal frequency that no, it's us, specifically it's me, I'm what's important. And I need "stuff" to affirm it. I need to tune out the planet because the planet's not so concerned with me.

There is in fact the occasional good morsel on TV, and the author concedes this, but at the same time, the way this is written serves to underline the absurdity that IS an extremely large portion of today's programming. People need a solid and significant exposure to nature in order to keep themselves grounded and to focus on the bigger picture and on what's important in life. We need the information that we can only get by spending time immersed in nature. We're getting less and less of this, and it's to our own detriment. I'd highly recommend giving this a read. It's well written and it carries a valuable message.