"TMI"

                                                                   Sydney M. Williams 

More Essays from Essex

“TMI”

May 6, 2023

 

“We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom.”

                                                                                                                Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, 1998

                                                                                                                E.O. Wilson (1929-2021)

 

TMI stands for too much information; it refers to the divulgence of personal data or an expression of boredom regarding particulars offered. For example, if I spoke inappropriately about someone or complained about a personal ailment, one of my children would say, “TMI, Dad.” This essay uses that acronym to express the fact that we are overwhelmed with a plethora of information, from books, magazines, newspapers (on-line and print), and from e-mails, texts, and all forms of social media.

 

Too much is tossed our way, yet our brain has not evolved to accommodate the increase. This is not new, as Professor Wilson (in the rubric) noted a quarter of a century ago. It has just gotten worse. Long before the internet and when there was far less data to consider, Sherlock Holmes was conscious of an overabundance of information. In A Study in Scarlet, Holmes responded to Dr. Watson: “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out…” Today, the amount of information is multiples of what was then available, yet our cranial capacity is unchanged. We are deluged. Estimates are that the amount of information doubles every two years, most of it useless for individual purposes. 

 

Online subscriptions account for about half of newspaper and magazine sales, a trend that will persist as computer literacy increases. Nevertheless, the number of journalists in the U.S., according to a recent study at Northwestern University, has declined from 75,000 in 2005 to 31,400 in 2021. On the other hand, a Pew Research Center survey showed that the number of bloggers in the U.S. – those who offer opinions regardless of facts – has increased from 11 million in 2005 to 32 million in 2021. The consequence: we get less real information and more (to borrow one of President Biden’s favorite words) malarkey. 

 

This expansion of digital information appears unstoppable. Dr. Melvin Vopson, Lecturer in Physics at England’s University of Portsmouth, recently wrote on the subject for The Conversation: Each day, across the world, “we generate 500 million tweets, 294 billion e-mails, 4 billion gigabytes of Facebook data, 65 billion WhatsApp messages, and 720,000 hours of new content added daily on YouTube.” The enigma: How to wend one’s way through this morass?

 

The important thing is to not let your brain become cluttered with useless trivia. The good thing is that a headline tells us if the story is worth reading. If it is about Hollywood, Harry and Meaghan, a gruesome murder, or the Kardashians, I let it go. Except for following half a dozen people on Instagram, posting my essays on LinkedIn and a blog, and texting my children and grandchildren, I don’t use social media. As Andy Kessler recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal: “Distraction is a curable affliction.”

 

If you read this far, thank you; but consider: You could have spent the time taking a walk, smelling a flower, or holding a loved one’s hand.