A million backwards trumpets

F4+50mm_D400_IlfosolS14-029, originally uploaded by Ian Tindale.

Stop collecting. The storing of information is a reflex, a hang-over from the days where information wasn't as high-volume as it is now. Was there ever such a time? Of course there was. Only a few generations ago, the current of information that flowed into the infosphere was very simply less - less intense, less frequent, less wide. You could still spend a lifetime overloading yourself in a library or similar place of research. You could still listen to the radio all day or read newspapers for the bulk of the morning* but the volume and diversity and sheer speed of update wasn't there to the degree it is now.

We tend to squirrel away information that vaguely fits our interest profile, partly because we think it might be useful to us one day in an unspecified future - in a kind of reference building activity. We also now do something that wasn't strongly evident before, and that is we squirrel into public view the information we're squirrelling away. This we might do to demonstrate our persona in a similar way that there's some value to be gained by broadcasting the information regarding what's currently playing on our own computer's iTunes right now, or that via Facebook others learn that that we've just scratched our arse. The building of an information interest profile is something a lot of people are actively interested in demonstrating to others. So a lot of information is not just squirrelled away for future use, it's used to paint a picture of who we are by what we find interesting.

Whether we ever return to anything we've starred, shared, bookmarked (socially or otherwise) is a completely different problem - for most occasions and I presume most people, the act of bookmarking is a write-only experience.

The deluge of information isn't just information, though. Because we know what kinds of information comes through which conduits, and because we've built up a mental profile of what that conduit in each case characterises, we tend to treat the information we get from the channel as having a 'flavour' or resonance that was given to it by passing through that channel to get to us. Our expectations of a channel form a resonant shaping of the information that we suck from it.

It's like a million backwards trumpets - each trumpet has its own resonant frequency, each trumpet has its own characteristic tonality and timbre, and each trumpet is facing us. Perhaps the trumpets aren't blowing information at us in discordant cacophonic unison, perhaps we're sucking the information back through the trumpets, to us.

footnote:
* strangely, I've never actually bought a newspaper to read, and almost never read them - I've can probably count the occasions on my hands that I've read more than a page of someone else's newspaper - I simply don't like them, and it's always been that way. Now, of course, many new generations are growing up with no attachment to newspapers, but I'm 47 - I grew up in the 60s and 70s and rejected that media during that time, unlike my peers who are habitual users.