Paying attention
The late lamented media critic Neil Postman urged us not to take in any new information after 8pm. This allows us both to think about what we have heard during waking hours and to go to sleep eventually. And keeps us from amusing ourselves to death.
I was fascinated by this recent New Yorker article. It's about a guy who is slowly and carefully reading every word of every New York Times article. He's given up on the sports section. But he's still far behind:
“Tobin reads the Times every day, struggling to find the two and a half hours necessary to get through it. He keeps stacks of newspapers in the front seat of his car and in spare cupboards, in case he finds himself without a paper in hand.
Tobin is behind in his Times reading. One year, five months, and four days behind, which places him in late June, 2002. In his daily paper, the United States has not yet invaded Iraq, the D.C. sniper hasn¬ít fired a shot, and Gray Davis is secure in Sacramento.”
Mr. Tobin is paying attention. He's doing one thing at a time. It takes two and a half hours for him to read the paper, and if he doesn't have that much time he simply allows himself to fall behind. He's got time. In fact, he doesn't even really want to know the current news; he doesn't want to spoil the suspense of the stories he's following.
But he does read the paper — very carefully. This is reminiscent of the recent Times coverage of the Malvo jury selection, in which a high school civics teacher (and potential juror) said (in essence), “I read the paper 364 days a year.” Why only 364? Because the judge told the jurors not to read the paper that day. “I'm a human being,” the civics teacher said. “I read the newspaper.” The civics teacher had already formed an opinion about Malvo's guilt, so he was excused from serving. And the judge told him he could pick up a paper on the way home.
Take a look at this page. Or this one. How will Mr. Tobin keep up? How will human beings (like the civics teacher) possibly absorb all this? And how can we stop taking in any new information after 8pm?
Perhaps the answer is that the global brain is paying attention for us. We're all reading newspapers and reading blogs, and the line between newspaper and blog keeps getting blurrier. With any luck, we're creating higher levels of useful information (meta information, information about information) and getting better informed.
But some part of me is jealous of Mr. Tobin, and his slow and careful progress through yellowed back issues of the Times.