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On Being Informed
The many kinds of knowing and the essence of consent
It’s a strange land, this data-fueled, privacy-less Age of Information. There’s so much to know, so quickly, so always, that it’s easy to get lost and fall behind. The current in the stream of data is simply too fast for us to keep our footing, so to be alive in such a rush is not only strange, but estranging. The constant flood makes us feel dislocated, adrift on a stormy sea of things-we-ought-to-know.
It’s stranger still that the amount of information seems to correspond inversely to our capacity to be informed. The information overload is constant and cacophonous. We liken it to a disease, “infobesity,” “infoxification,” or to a violation of boundaries; “Too much information!” we emphatically complain. As the flood of it reaches biblical proportions, we find ourselves treading water in an apocalypse of meaning: misinformation and lies, alternative facts and occluded details. An Information Age that makes it near-impossible to truly be informed.
What is information, anyway? What does it even mean to be informed?
There’s an initial idea that comes to mind, of course, built from remnants of a childhood spent answering questions in class and an adulthood spent reading the news and adjusting my outrage accordingly. To be informed must mean to know the…
