Information Overload

I am sensitive to the fact that people today are bombarded with things to read, to see, to listen to. The time spent in telephone conversations, text messages and other social networking messages young people are sending and receiving, for example, is staggering. But do these electronic-sustained missives really contain content or substance commensurate with the time we spend engaged with them? Are they satisfying and growth-promoting?

As a counterpoint, and since I am inviting others to engage with me, I intend in Omnium-Gatherum to always have something to say that is new, meaningful, thought-provoking or otherwise worthwhile; otherwise there is no point in writing the postings—or your reading them. Even 2600 years ago it was recorded on some metal plates: “[my successors] shall not occupy these plates with things which are not of worth unto the children of men.”

I do not want to be like the lawyer of whom Abraham Lincoln said, “He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas better than any man I have ever met.”

The observation I share today, then, is that sheer verbosity whether in electronic text, ink text, or verbal ‘conversation’ might, if we are purveyors of it, with benefit be reevaluated. (This sentence might be reevaluated.) In professor and editor William Zinsser’s classic guide, On Writing Well, he said to “simplify, simplify, simplify,” and that “writing improves in direct ratio to the number of things we can keep out of it that…don’t serve any purpose.”

Two guidelines each of us might keep in mind are these: (1) Man—and woman—has been given two ears and one mouth; we should use them proportionately. (2) Remember the case of the very pretty woman who was tediously loquacious who complained one day to a distinguished matron that she was constantly tormented but then suddenly dropped by her suitors. “I may be able to help you, my dear,” she said. “It is very easy to get rid of them. All you have to do is to open your mouth and start speaking.”