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Data Smog and the Christian Life
- 07/16/08
- 25
We are at a strange and unique stage of human history. The combination of the Internet, electronic storage media, the rapid rate of technological progress and the fast-pace of our society, has given us unparalleled access to unparalleled amounts of information. Never in history have people had access to so much information. Consider just a few examples:
Google currently indexes billions upon billions of web pages and adds hundreds of thousands more every day (I was not able to find an exact count, but as of 2005 the page count was already well in excess of 8 billion). Almost every one of those pages contains at least some information. Amazon and other internet retailers sell hundreds of thousands of different books, videos and other sources of information. Newspapers, especially weekend editions, are obscenely large, often totaling hundreds of pages and weighing several pounds. In Spiritual Disciplines For The Christian Life, Don Whitney says that the amount of information contained in just one weekday edition of the New York Times contains more information than a man like Jonathan Edwards would have encountered in his entire life (though I can’t imagine how that is really measurable).
A 2003 study showed that print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media produced about 5 exabytes of new information in 2002. Ninety-two percent of the new information was stored on magnetic media, mostly in hard disks, meaning that much of it was readily available to others. (5 exabytes = 5 billion gigabytes, or the equivalent of 125,000,000 average-sized hard drives. This was a dramatic increase from just two years before when the total amount of new information was a “mere” 1.5 exabytes. “How big is five exabytes? If digitized with full formatting, the seventeen million books in the Library of Congress contain about 136 terabytes of information; five exabytes of information is equivalent in size to the information contained in 37,000 new libraries the size of the Library of Congress book collections.” And that is the total for just one year.
Neil Postman, in a talk entitled “Informing Ourselves To Death” once spoke about the information facing Americans: “In America, there are 260,000 billboards; 11,520 newspapers; 11,556 periodicals; 27,000 video outlets for renting tapes; 362 million tv sets; and over 400 million radios. There are 40,000 new book titles published every year (300,000 world-wide) and every day in America 41 million photographs are taken, and just for the record, over 60 billion pieces of advertising junk mail come into our mail boxes every year. Everything from telegraphy and photography in the 19th century to the silicon chip in the twentieth has amplified the din of information, until matters have reached such proportions today that for the average person, information no longer has any relation to the solution of problems.” That was years ago and since then the amount of information has grown almost exponentially.
All of this points to the fact that we are facing much more information than humans did in days past. In fact, we are facing information overload. We cannot possibly keep up with the amount of information that is coming our way. Yet in many ways it is becoming increasingly important to our lives that we do just that.
Francis Heylighen, in a 1999 article entitled “Change and Information Overload: negative effects” writes about the problem of information overload as a condition that is becoming increasingly destructive in the workforce. He shows that the acceleration of change in our society has caused a dramatic increase in information, and thus an increase in the amount of information the average person needs to know.
The acceleration of change is accompanied by an increase in the information needed to keep up with all these developments. This too leads to psychological, physical and social problems. A world-wide survey (Reuters, 1996) found that two thirds of managers suffer from increased tension and one third from ill-health because of information overload. The psychologist David Lewis, who analysed the findings of this survey, proposed the term “Information Fatigue Syndrome” to describe the resulting symptoms. Other effects of too much information include anxiety, poor decision-making, difficulties in memorizing and remembering, and reduced attention span (Reuters, 1996; Shenk, 1997). These effects merely add to the stress caused by the need to constantly adapt to a changing situation.Part of the problem is caused by the fact that technological advances have made the retrieval, production and distribution of information so much easier than in earlier periods. This has reduced the natural selection processes which would otherwise have kept all but the most important information from being published. The result is an explosion in often irrelevant, unclear and inaccurate data fragments, making it ever more difficult to see the forest through the trees. This overabundance of low quality information, which Shenk (1997) has called “data smog”, is comparable in its emergence and effects to the pollution of rivers and seas caused by an excess of fertilizers, or to the health problems caused by a diet too rich in calories. The underlying mechanism may be called “overshooting”: because progress has inertia, the movement in a given direction tends to continue even after the need has been satisfied. Whereas information used to be scarce, and having more of it was considered a good thing, it seems that we now have reached the point of saturation, and need to limit our use of it.
His conclusion is that the biggest problem facing our society is not that we are making too little progress, but that we are making too much! I think I know just what he means.
Christians are by no means exempt from the impact of information overload. Consider, for example, a pastor who lived in America in the early nineteenth century. What information was he privy to on a daily basis? If he lived in a large town he may have had access to a newspaper and perhaps even a library. He may have owned a few books, but generally he had very little access to significant amounts of information. He usually rose and went to bed with the sun, he never watched CNN, never listened to the radio, and if he lived outside of the city, may have only rarely had anyone to talk to outside of his family members. But consider a pastor today. We can be sure he has access to hundreds of television channels, hundreds of radio stations, billions of web pages, millions of books, newspapers, magazines and so on. The phone rings constantly, the cell phone interrupts his meetings and the computer beeps that a new email has arrived.
In many ways the nineteenth century pastor had a difficult life compared to what we experience today, yet, in the words of Don Whitney, “On the other hand, he never had to answer a telephone once in his entire lifetime! Despite his inconveniences, his mind, like the psalmist’s, was not as distracted by instant world news, television and radio, portable and car telephones, personal stereos, rapid transportation, junk mail, and so on. Because of these things, it’s harder for us today to concentrate our thoughts, especially on God and Scripture, than it ever has been.”
How can a Christian find time to just sit and think, or sit and memorize or meditate upon Scripture? I know first-hand how difficult it is to remove myself from this information overload, even for a few days or a few hours. I consider it a hardship to be disconnected from email and the internet, and often my job depends on having near-instant access to these technologies. It is such a temptation to begin my day with checking my email and checking my favorite blogs and news sites rather than beginning quietly with God. I have a difficult time turning off the phone and the computer so I can sit and memorize God’s Word, even for just a few minutes at a time. I have succumbed to the information overload, and have loved being a part of it. I have seen the data smog envelop my life. But, as with many other Christians, I know it has affected my spiritual life. While the information we are privy to is in many ways a blessing, in other ways it is a temptation and a curse.
Some days I thank God for the vast amount of information at my disposal. Other days I just wish it would all go away. In my more rational moments I know that this is impossible - the information is going to increase, not decrease. Therefore I am responsible before God to live a spiritually disciplined life in spite of this information overload. I am responsible before Him to carve time out of this information influx so I can just be alone with Him; alone with no telephone, no email, no internet. It is critical to my spiritual well-being that I find ways of removing and properly managing these distractions that keep me from spending the time He and I need to build a thriving, growing relationship.
I am a follower of Jesus Christ, a husband to Aileen and a father to three young children. I worship and serve as a pastor at 
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Comments (25)
This resonates with me as I often have to leave my little home and seek solitude in the church next door to be still and quiet before God. My e-mail, wondering mind, desire to google something, cell phone, and everything else often prove to be too compelling for me to find time to be alone with God. It’s sad to me that those things would come before my Savior, and I realize more and more that I need discipline (and accountability) in this arena (especially as the information overload and accessiblity only increase).
As a church planter, one of the areas this post touches on for me is the challenge of guarding and protecting a flock that has such ready access to false, misleading, and dangerous information.
It’s a two way street. You have the ability to quickly spread Christ-exalting and glorious truth but you also have the danger of heresy being quickly spread as well.
With the vast amount of information readily available, you can’t possibly read and be aware of all this is potentially out there, therefore you never know where the next challenge that you’re not aware of might come from. It’s a daunting thing to think about.
But I agree with your conclusion Tim - simply unplugging and assuming an ostrich position isn’t the answer.
Thank you for the post.
Tim, I think you’ve highlighted some of the real drawbacks of the information age that we’re in. I think maybe I look at it more optimistically, however. Just as technological advances have proven to give man the ability to magnify evil, I also believe it has given us the power to magnify good. If someone, by God’s grace, can have the discipline and laser-sharp focus to not get bogged down in information, but utilize it all to the glory of God, then it seems like we ought to be able to accomplish more for the kingdom, in terms of global impact, than those who have gone before us. In investment terms, our current age could be thought of as high risk but also high reward. Because of all the abundance of information, there is more opportunity to screw things up, but if we get it right, then potentially more good can be done with the same amount of effort.
Tim, you hit on a problem that so many of us face. We are no longer just busy working and living life, we are busy just to be busy. It seems that we have to keep busy or else people don’t think we are important. How many times have you heard a person say, “Wow, I am not busy at all. There are days when I do very little.” We always hear, “Wow, I am so busy. There is so much that I have to do.”
Its as if our worth is determined by the fullness of our calendar.
This is not true, however, for every area. Even here in Canada there are places that value a slower pace, and frown upon the frenetic pace in the rest of the country. I was recently asked this question by a person in Prince Edward Island, “It sounds like you are a workaholic, what do you do to slow down?”
What an amazing question! You would not get that everywhere. It is nice to know that there are people who still value the slower pace, a pace that allows you to remain sane and connected with God and others.
Tim, thanks for your honesty about your struggles with the information age.In your comparisons with the 19th century pastor we have to ask ourselves the question, “Is it the volume of the information that helps the spread of the gospel or the spiritual depth of the messenger that matters more?” Jesus has much more information than we could ever hope to have, but the first disciples were drawn to him not by the information he possessed but by who He is.
“It is such a temptation to begin my day with checking my email and checking my favorite blogs and news sites rather than beginning quietly with God. I have a difficult time turning off the phone and the computer so I can sit and memorize God’s Word, even for just a few minutes at a time. I have succumbed to the information overload, and have loved being a part of it. I have seen the data smog envelop my life.”
I’m guilty, guilty, guilty. In fact, just this past weekend at our church’s monthly Men’s breakfast I shared with my table that I need to stop being a media junkie.
I shared that I spent too much time on e-mail, on blogging, on internet surfing, on watching junk tv, watching DVD’s, reading junk magazines, reading suspense fiction, etc…. that’s all taking away time from my being a husband, a father, and a disciple of Christ.
Someone could even poke fun at me for taking the time to add a comment to this blog post! But the Challies blog is edifying for my walk with the Lord. So keep blogging Tim! It’s the other blogs and commenting on their threads that I need to stop!
Pax bro’.
The temptation to turn on the computer before Devotions is even greater when you have family in different time zones. I am so thankful to the Lord for our modern technology, especially ” Skype”. I spoke to my sister in Sudan and daughter in Northern Kenya ( both missionaries) before I had breakfast this morning. What an incredible blessing and all free!
Tim - all I can say is AMEN!! I have the same struggles, and I shall pray for you even as I pray for myself…blessings!
You are right to point out that search is one of the critical technologies in finding information but the price for using search is information overload. A practical addition to any search results would be adding summaries permitting at a glance to see the essence of the text without the clutter of details.
I’m working with summarization technology and when I do Google searches, the results are automatically summarized and presented according to the keywords of my interest. Such search + summarization approach lets the user much quicker find out the relevant documents.
In fact summarization is a good filtering technology that can be a real asset in reducing information overload while taking better advantage of search engines.
Great. The problem is too much digitally available information. So, you tell us all about the problem in a long, electronic post full of statistical information.
Now THERE’S some irony for you. :)
Thank you Tim for an honest post. Although it has been a long time coming, I have reached a conclusion of sorts recently. I can’t keep up with everything everywhere everytime everyone does something. I now realize I am not God and will never be omniscient. In fact, it’s too much of a challenge to even be ‘ascantlittlecorneroftheworldscient’. I am (slowly) walking a path of simplifying my life. I won’t walk away from everything modern, but I simply MUST moderate my slavish devotion to the faceless hordes of the internet (even in a ‘Christian’ endeavor such as evangelism). Too many… too much… it dilutes us until there is nothing left. Yours is one of the select few blogs I visit. You continue to demonstrate godly wisdom. I shall return.
A temptation for me with the digital overload is the number of great sermons available. The pendulum has swung back and forth over the last couple of years for me. On one hand having a consistent diet of sermons by Piper, CJ Mahaney, Macarthur, Jonathan Edwards, conference messages, etc has seemed to be good for my soul. On the other hand I have been forgetful that my own Pastor has been ordained by God to preach the Word to us (me) in our local church. I am now taking the time where I was listening to those other great preachers to listen to my own Pastor again and first ensure I get all that God intended for me to feed on and apply from him.
What conclusions have others come to regarding this matter?
Ouch. That hurts. Have you ever sat in a sermon and felt like the preacher was looking straight at you and knew exactly what to say to convict you the most. That’s how I felt when I read this post.
I really do get tired of being constantly connected. It is so difficult to really get alone with God for more than an hour. Makes you wonder what the consequences of this are in our lives.
However I also recognize the benefits the information age was afforded me. The sermons I hear that I would never hear. The teaching I read that I would never have seen. It is really hard to weight the cost and benefit of it all.
My take away from this post is that we need to be careful with it all. Is it bringing us closer to God or distracting us from Him? I think that is the question. And I think at times it has done both for me.
Sorry, I couldn’t finish reading this article. It was just too much information. :)
Every. Single. Day. Every day I deal with this. I particularly identify with the double-minded (in essence) “Turn it off! Don’t turn it off!” There are times when I tell my husband to take the cable cord with him to work because I cannot be piddling around on my favorite sites, reading articles (etc.) all day. I USED TO READ. It is actually more devastating to our generation, as opposed to the generation after us. I’m thirty and witnessed the boom and still remember time—thoughtful, deeply special time—without this glut of info, mainly internet.
What to do?
I love media info. books, the net, blogs - I don’t watch a lot of television but I still find my mind rapidly switching channels in conversation, especially in prayer. The challenge is how can we possibly exist in Western Civ. without information overload? It would be like living in the iron age and having no acquaintance with metallurgy. If anyone has a real solution on how to still the soul living in a world driven by media/images I would love to know.
By the way, thanks for your contribution to my attention deficit!
First-time commenter—I’m the husband of Diane, a few comments up. I experience this too. Perhaps the glut of information will reach a tipping point, much like the Industrial Revolution and the technology that was generated from it. There, with pollution, urban squalor, corruption and child labor, while those problems still exist to a degree, there was a corrective movement throughout the 20th century. We were able to develop technology to distance ourselves from the technology, so to speak, and the lives we lead are “better” than they would have been a century or so ago.
Maybe it will be the same way with the information overload—a few years or decades down the road (I imagine that if it DOES happen it will happen more quickly than the corrective aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, the pace of society being what it is these days) society will realize what kind of effect the information glut is having. Our realization of its effects now gives us an opportunity as believers to speak genuinely to people disillusioned by it all.
Great, thoughtful post.
Tim, bravo, as usual. I would love for you to get Nicholas Carr’s book “The Big Switch: Rewiring the world from Edison to Google” and do one of your reviews. It’s an incredible book, especially the last chapter, “iGod”.
In reply to Matt’s question about balancing intake from prominent preachers vs the home church pastor, I have had similar struggles for many years. I have placed a priority to attend and be attentive to the Sunday morning message from my pastor. I do not tend to listen to it repeatedly throughout the week. I take notes during the sermon and meditate on it throughout the week. God has used my pastor to impact my life and the lives of those around me in the context in which we live.
I have both audio sermons and conference speeches from several gifted national Christian speakers. I turn to these in streaks, but even then I would say it is in moderation. With the glut of information available, you could theoretically occupy yourself with helpful preaching 24 hours a day for several years. While our driven lifestyle might lead us to think this would be a good idea, it isn’t. No one in the history of the world has ever accomplished such a feat. It is unnecessary and denies so many other aspects of a full Christian life.
I hope this helps, Matt.
Tim,
At the risk of preaching to the preacher, I humbly submit that…
As I read your post I couldn’t help but see a somewhat self-enhanced panic mounting as you built your information over-load argument. Nothing you stated or quoted was inherently untrue; but I couldn’t help but think that there was an obvious solution. And the solution is (your favorite subject?): the discipline of Christian discernment! Now your book (which I would love to read when time permits) focuses specifically on spiritual discernment. As important as spiritual discernment is, there are other discernment disciplines or skills that the Christian should pray for and pursue so as to stay healthy spiritually, mentally, and physically. I also might pick on your treatise a bit in that I’m not so sure that the issue is so much that the volume of the information has skyrocketed; as much as it is the ease of access to it all that creates the potential problem and directly drives the need for self-control and good discernment skills.
There’s no doubt that the information age has created a volumetric tsunami of both good and bad information. And because this information is so easily retrieved and made available; I posit that good (Spirit led) discernment skills now become of paramount importance! Look at it this way: the material that is instantly available to us spans from the extremely obscene to the truly Holy. Except for ease of access, do our modern Christian discernment skills really need to be stronger than say the discernment skills of a 19th century Christian walking into a large public library of his day? He would also find massive amounts of information that ranged from the depraved to the Divine would he not? His Christian discernment skills would be employed at the library card catalog drawer; just as our God honoring skills should be well exercised while doing a Google search.
Regarding how to moderate the amount of time to invest in all things informational? I suppose the library model could again be used in that our 19th century Christian could certainly abuse his family, his career, and his health by not moderating his library usage at a sensible level. Here we come back to the issue of self-control and discipline. These same personal attributes should also be applied when accessing modern information sources.
Tim, you have a great blog that I enjoy greatly! Your discernment skills regarding all things Biblical are superb! However, when it comes to the care and feeding of your blog; please forget what I said earlier about self-control! ;—)
In Christ,
Dan…
Thanks for this article. And for all the others in the past! I’m a rather dedicated reader. I decided to emerge from the shadows to tell you that this post featured, along with quite a few others, in the first edition of the Reformed Christian Blog Carnival on my blog.
Whenever someone takes off with a bunch of huge numbers to explain some point, it’s almost always true that they are headed in the wrong direction.
1. “All of this points to the fact that we are facing much more information than humans did in days past.”We all have the same capacity. Every person today that is awake 16 hours each day can absorb exactly the same amout of visual, audio, and tactile information as Jonathan Edwards, Jesus disciples, and Abraham in 16 hours. Every person has the same capacity to view and hear information as anyone else at any time. We are not “facing much more information than humans did in days past.” We are only facing as much visual and audio information as they did.
2. “In fact, we are facing information overload.”There is, in fact, no information overload. No person’s sensory inputs are overloaded by information. We all, essentially, see the same amount of scenes each hour as anyone else. We all receive the same amount of sound each hour.
3. “We cannot possibly keep up with the amount of information that is coming our way.”This is a true statement. However, it has always been true. Since the dawn of time. We never could and never will be able to keep track of everything.
4. “Yet in many ways it is becoming increasingly important to our lives that we do just that.”This is also not true. We can never keep up. We are not designed to even try.
As soon as the argument is couched in numerical terms all is lost. That will always be a losing battle. The devil couches it in numbers. Larger and larger numbers. Quantity. God does not want us thinking about the numbers. He wants us to think about Quality. Quantity vs Quality.
Gideon had too many men to win the battle. God wanted quality, not quantity.Baal had 400 prophets, God had one. Quality vs quantity.Solomon had 700 wives.
Jesus talked over and over about quality. Mostly referring to our hearts.
God doesn’t love a big giver, he loves a cheerful giver.God doesn’t want us building bigger barns. He wants us to hand out cups of water.A woman with two coins gave more than all the rest.
The devil wants us to believe that 250, or 500 or 1,000 channels is a really good thing. However, a 1,000 channels of garbage, piped directly into your home is not really a good thing.
A billion web pages full of junk, get rich quick schemes, and peddling promiscuity is still a billion pages of junk.
“Because of these things, it’s harder for us today to concentrate our thoughts, especially on God and Scripture, than it ever has been.”
It’s the same as it’s always been. What’s in your heart. Abraham had just as many distractions to sin as Jesus disciples and Jonathan Edwards. Same as you and me. We want to try and rationalize away our responsibility. “Oh me, oh me, what huge numbers of …. we have today, aren’t we oppressed!”.
1 Corinthians 10:13 says that we will have a way of escape.
It’s actually amazing how physically easy it is to avoid the “information overload”. Turn it off. Just turn it off. The switch is right there, right next to your finger. Just a tiny flick of the finger away.It’s really easy to avoid state sponsored gambling. Don’t buy a ticket.It’s really easy to avoid getting drunk every night. Don’t go to the bar.It’s really easy to avoid getting into trouble with another woman. Don’t go out with her.Go home and be with your family and children.Go read your bible.Go pray.
So easy and yet so far away.
Your last paragraph seems to be saying that this is a struggle for you. You feel drawn to being “connected”. Sort of like the drinker and the gambler. It’s something you want to manage. It won’t work. If it’s sin, it can’t be managed. It must be purged. Turned off.
What are you going to put your eyes, your ears, and your fingers in front of today? What are you going to choose to view, choose to listen to, choose to touch? If the information that you are gathering is causing stress and anxiety, it’s not because of the amount of information, it’s because of the quality of information and the choices you’ve made.
Ummm, excuse me, didn’t you just add more ‘Data Smog’??? :-)
Just read off the official google blog:
“when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!”
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.html
Crazy!
It is absolutely true that religion preaches the good things and diverts our lives to success. Your post reminds me of one another post which i have seen at http://www.succcess.org/2008/09/01/the-belief-tree-why-success-is-binary/#comments based on success in life. Your post also depicts the lesson of success.