Tyranny Of The Moment: Fast And Slow Time In The Information Age

This book is spectacular. Written by Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Professor of Social Anthropology at the Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture at the University of Oslo, and published in 2000, it becomes obvious that the book is not simply an observation of the way things are, but a personal longing to overcome the fragmentation, confusion, and rootlessness that has come to characterize life in the developed world. Eriksen points to information as the engine that has driven humankind to this point in history: the availability of information, the breadth of it, the speed at which it comes, the diversity of sources providing the information, and the overwhelming saturation in information that we experience. In the preface, Eriksen offers one of his many irresistibly quotable phrases as he assesses the situation: "there are strong indications that we are about to create a kind of society where it becomes nearly impossible to think a thought that is more than a couple of inches long." Eriksen introduces the term "information lint," which refers to the countless pieces of random information that fill all of the gaps in our lives - what some would call "down time." This constant inundation of information produces a breathless society filled with anxiety. "Indeed," Eriksen notes "even the `here and now' is threatened since the next moment comes so quickly that it becomes difficult to live in the present." Eriksen starts out with a brief overview of the Information Age, stating up front that he is not an anti-technology Luddite. His is not a rejection of technology or even speed for that matter, but a cry for balance in our lives and in the world. Interestingly, he points to the fall of the Soviet Union, which ended the cold war and ushered in an era of USA democratic values being unchallenged around the world, as the point at which the Information Age kicked into high gear. Individualism and freedom (including free markets) spread unabated throughout the world, aided in a kind of mutual admiration society by the technological reifications of those values. Eriksen states that "the bipolar world has been replaced with a unipolar world. That pole is called market liberalism and individualism, and it beats the drum with catchwords like flexibility, freedom and openness." One helpful concept offered by Eriksen is that people need freedom from information. We obviously have more information than we know what to do with, yet it keeps coming at us from every direction. Eriksen asserts that "a crucial skill in information society consists in protecting oneself against the 99.99 per cent of the information offered that one does not want (and, naturally, exploiting the last 0.01 per cent in a merciless way)." He points out that where information was once empowering - and in one sense still is - now the key to achieving one's educational goals lies in the proper filtering of information. If filtering is a priority, then the logical question is how does one