McLuhan - part 2

I was going to blog on Thursday just like almost everyone else, but the system wouldn’t let me sign in.  I think that will be the excuse for the next millenium: “I couldn’t do it because [put necessary tech here] wouldn’t let me.”  Everything is so new and so not understood that it’s hard to argue against it.  Anyways, not what’s been on my mind.

What’s been on my mind, was something that McLuhan said while debating with Mailor, namely,

“When you give people too much information, they instantly resort to pattern recognition, into structuring the experience.”

Someday in the future I’ll have enough free time to explore McLuhan beyond the trivia stage, reading a few of his books, and then a book or two explaining the books, but for now I have only my current structures to interpret what he might have meant.  I know from psychology that new information is either assimilated or accommodated.  In this respect, McLuhan does not seem to be saying anything new; assimilation is fitting the new information within old structures, and accommodation is when a new structure is made, or an old one adapted, to make the new information fit.

When I receive too much new information, however, I do neither.  Sure, there might be the odd snippet of something that catches my ear that can be assimilated easily and quickly (I shall call these things trivia) but the rest just gets lost.  In an information overload, I accommodate almost nothing.  Instead, I will sum up the information into an already preconceived way of looking at the world - I’ll make it fit the patterns I already have - and ignore the rest.  The result?  Sheep.  To be sure, there have always been ‘sheeple’ around, but it’s an increasing phenomenon.  Today’s whitenoise of information causes me to ignore everything.

Information, or new knowledge is like water flowing over ground.  It’s the water that gets a chance to soak in the changes the ground.  But a lot of water dumped all at once gets channeled into patterns which already exist, gullies as it were, formed to get rid of the water in the most efficient ways possible.