Quotes About Information

Our television set keeps us in constant communion with the world, but it does so with a face whose smiling countenance is unalterable. The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether.

The result of all this is that Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world.

Information has become a form of garbage, not only incapable of answering the most fundamental human questions but barely useful in providing coherent direction to the solution of even mundane problems.

water everywhere without a drop to drink may serve as a metaphor of a decontextualized information environment:

There is no denying that the technicalization of terms and problems is a serious form of information control.

Walter Lippmann, for example, wrote in 1920: "There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.

When there is too much information to sustain any theory, information becomes essentially meaningless.

Nonetheless, as incomprehensible problems mount, as the concept of progress fades, as meaning itself becomes suspect, the Technopolist stands firm in believing that what the world needs is yet more information. It is like the joke about the man who complains that the food he is being served in a restaurant is inedible and also that the portions are too small

Now ... this" idea: the phenomenon whereby the reporting of a horrific event—a rape or a five-alarm fire or global warming—is followed immediately by the anchor's cheerfully exclaiming "Now ... this," which segues into a story about Janet Jackson's exposed nipple or a commercial for lite beer, creating a sequencing of information so random, so disparate in scale and value, as to be incoherent, even psychotic.

And in its absence, what possible interest could there be in a list of what the President says now and what he said then?

The Bill of Rights is largely a prescription for preventing government from restricting the flow of information and ideas. But the Founding Fathers did not foresee that tyranny by government might be superseded by another sort of problem altogether, namely, the corporate state, which through television now controls the flow of public discourse in America.

Stern reported that 51 percent of viewers could not recall a single item of news a few minutes after viewing a news program on television. Wilson found that the average television viewer could retain only 20 percent of the information contained in a fictional televised news story. Katz et al. found that 21 percent of television viewers could not recall any news items within one hour of broadcast.

In a sea of information, there was very little of it to use.

Amusing Ourselves to Death is a call to action. It is, in my father's words, "an inquiry ... and a lamentation," yes, but it aspires to greater things. It is an exhortation to do something. It's a counterpunch to what my father thought daily TV news was: "inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action.

in the Age of Television, our information environment is completely different from what it was in 1783; that we have less to fear from government restraints than from television glut; that, in fact, we have no way of protecting ourselves from information disseminated by corporate America; and that, therefore, the battles for liberty must be fought on different terrains from where they once were.

This may account for Americans' overuse of the courts as a means of finding coherence and stability. As other institutions become unusable as mechanisms for the control of wanton information, the courts stand as a final arbiter of truth. For how long, no one knows. I

Wars, crimes, crashes, fires, floods—much of it the social and political equivalent of Adelaide's whooping cough—became the content of what people called "the news of the day.

Yeni teknolojiler eskiden beri süregelen enformasyon sorununu tepetaklak etmiÅŸtir: Ä°nsanlar bir zamanlar enformasyona gerçek hayat ortamlar?n? kendileri yönlendirebilmek amac?yla ihtiyaç duyarken, ÅŸimdilerde, asl?nda hiçbir iÅŸe yaramayan enformasyonlar?n görünüÅŸte yararl? olabileceÄŸi baÄŸlamlar? yaratmak zorunda kalmaktad?rlar.

The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into—what else?—another piece of news. Thus, we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.

The new focus on the image undermined traditional definitions of information, of news, and, to a large extent, of reality itself.

The principal strength of the telegraph was its capacity to move information, not collect it, explain it or analyze it.

But the telegraph demands that we burn its contents.

Television is not old enough to have matched printing's output of junk.

make content so abundantly available, context be damned, that we'll be overwhelmed by "information glut" until what is truly meaningful is lost and we no longer care what we've lost as long as we're being amused....