Text is not Dead

I started thinking about what Colin wrote about snapshot thinking. In this current digital age, people have little choice but to get only a snapshot of the news. David Grimshaw wrote about information overload (and, Dan, I think you’ll appreciate this):

The term “information overload” has its roots in the context of computer-mediated communications … Lest one is tempted to think of information overload as a new problem, let us recall the words of T. S. Eliot (1934), “where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”Eliot reminds us that turning information into knowledge is not easy and is far from automatic … It is important to understand the process by which data is or can be transformed into knowledge.

It’s impossible to process all of the information out there, and we have been reduced to trusting the very machine that has overwhelmed us with serving us only the important news. And, what’s important is typically judged by its popularity. When has the opinion of the general population been trustworthy. Is that wise?

Just how much control does the internet have over society? We know it is the source and sometimes the only source of news and information. Will we ever get back control? Will we ever actually make choices about information without the influence of the almighty computer? As I get close to the end of this semester, I have been asking myself these questions. And, I’ve found that, to an extent, I agree with the way Mark Laporta, a blogger, puts it:

Because thanks to search technology, we have seen the Internet — and realized it is us. When it’s all said and done, what we “mean” can only be grasped after a lifetime of experience in the wetware of everyday human existence. That’s still the most effective aggregator of the human wish list.

The ideal is balance, but is there any real way to achieve that? Can we move past seeing things in snapshots?