Information overload

I have been thinking lately of just how much we take for granted in life. It reminded me how lucky I was to live where I do now and not have to get into a panic about my telephone, computer, electric gates and swimming pool motor being knocked out by a thunderstorm.

I remember so well when that first highveld thunderstorm of the summer always managed to dump a deluge of rainwater on to my Internet service provider’s e-mail server with the result that I lost all communication with the outside world.

Suddenly I knew what it was like to be a ship without a sail, a hearth without a home, a game without a ball and a spin bowler with arthritis. I was desperate. I had to work incredibly hard to get the simplest job done. I was incommunicado. I was also in trouble.

I was forced to do what I always do in times of crisis. I sat down on my stoep and wondered. I wondered about fairly inconsequential stuff—but it wasn’t long before I started to do some serious thnking. I considered what my family would eat if these communications blackouts continued to deprive me of a living.

Given the voracity of appetite my children enjoyed in those days, I soon stopped wondering about what they would eat because once the cereal, Viennas and bread rolls ran out they would probably happily lay waste to the dog food and then move on to grass cuttings, hollyhocks and my two remaining ornamental lime trees.

So, I wondered about whether mankind could survive without communication. Without information. It suddenly struck me that we’d probably be a lot happier and healthier without our daily flood of info.

For a start, our hectic lifestyles would have to slow down enormously. Jobs would simply take longer as we sent messages by forked stick and then waited for yonks for the answer to come back.

We would also become a lot less paranoid about being killed, maimed, beaten, infected, robbed, taxed and tormented.

I remembered an incident when I lived in France many years ago. I phoned the insurance company for a quote on a householders policy because in my little village all the houses had massive locks, burglar bars made out of reject rugby posts and dogs that could swallow intruders whole.

The insurance company needed a statement from the local police on the number of incidents of housebreaking. I got the answer after a few days. The last incident had been in May 1778—some 200 years previously.

So why were the local inhabitants so terrified of being robbed? Simple. They watched TV and all those American cops and robbers programmes scared them witless. Their perception was that TV fiction was reality.

What a shame I thought. Here are these simple peasants living in crime-free Utopia but nonetheless terrified out of their francophone minds.

All of which suggests that we are not necessarily being informed by the media and the information highway, but rather scared to death by it all.

In a world where perception outweighs reality in the human psyche, it is logical to assume that far from receiving information, digesting it and then keeping what we want and turfing the rest, we are just swallowing the whole bangshoot, feet, feathers and all.

Without making any real effort to analyse it, we just accept what is fed to us and allow our opinions to be formed by total strangers.

We might be better off by being cut off from the rest of the world and just allowed to get on with our own little thing in our own little community.

Perhaps it’s not a bad idea. And apart from having to deal with trivial little irritations like global economies collapsing in a heap and neighbouring communities pillaging us from time to time, maybe we would have more peace of mind.

All of this I wondered about as I sat on my stoep waiting for my e-mail server and voicemail to click back into action.

I’d almost convinced myself that perhaps one day when I retire I should hive off to some backwoods where there was no radio, no newspaper, no television, no phone, or e-mail.

Surely life would be wonderful ?

My reverie was shattered when one of my kids, having finished pillaging the kitchen, wandered out onto the stoep and quite casually asked if I would be watching the rugby test on TV.

Come back information age, all was forgiven. A test live on TV or waiting three months for the result to get to me by Union Castle and ox wagon? Forget it—no contest.