The other day, I saw a video I enjoyed on Youtube. It was called Alternative Math, and offered a satirical take on some problems facing modern teachers. Since a lot of my family are in education, I passed the video around by email. My youngest sister, recently retired from music teaching, said she identified, but also pointed out that the filmlet was 'making fun of the wrong TV newscast'. I hadn't noticed (she had a point, this wasn't their sort of logical error), because….I never watch television news. Ever. Unless stuck in a waiting room somewhere with a television running, a situation I try to avoid. I used to get my car maintenance done in a place where they ran soap operas in the waiting room, which I found more traumatic than the repair bill.

I was just proofreading this week's Post Quiz by reading it aloud to Elektra, who is an avid fan of biology-based news. She surprised herself by having forgotten several of these recent animal-related news items.

'Information overload,' was her guess. I disagreed. I had a different theory, which I'm going to run by you.

I think the problem is 'information trance'. And it needs to stop.

Boomer Troubles

In spite of what the millennials think, the Baby Boomers are not their parents' generation. The Baby Boom came at the end of the Second World War, and we are their grandparents/greataunts and -uncles. You know, the fun but basically loony old gits with the weird ideas. All of us grew up during the first blush of television as a technology. Many became accustomed to the more or less incessant drone of the boob tube and its hypnotic chant, 'You want to buy this. Repeat, you want to buy this….'

I have spent decades of my life with minimal (or no) access to a television set¹, and I can live without it. I like watching documentaries, fictional series, and films: but Netflix and Amazon and DVDs and Youtube permit me to do this without attendant commercials. I choose what I watch, rather than 'seeing what's on'. This is not superior intellectual technique, or snobbery. It's self-preservation. Otherwise, my head gets full of stuff I don't have time for, and crowds out what I want to be thinking about. After all, I have to produce an ezine every week, and I'm writing three weeks ahead. I've got to fit an awful lot of research in the aging noggin. No room for the latest Cleo-award-worthy short epic on automobile beauty. That's not Public Domain, and I can't use it in the Post. Also, I have two books I need to read – both ordered on Amazon, by the way, and both because I saw something interesting on the internet, and did some research, and… And I've just got to practice the organ, and I've got some new music, and there's a video to make…you see what I mean? The news can tend to itself.

"You see," he [Sherlock Holmes] explained, "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."

Arthur Conan Doyle, 'A Study in Scarlet'

Okay. I would argue that it's not quite as bad as Mr Doyle maintained. After all, our minds can expand to include a vast number of things. I suspect Mark Gatiss would say that you just need a bigger Mind Palace. But Doyle is right about one thing: if you junk up your attention with irrelevant trivia, you may lose sight of what really matters. The valuable information can get lost in the detritus of old newspaper clippings, sales flyers, travel brochures, and whatnot on your desk. You need to sort it better.

Worse, allowing the public media to choose the topics of the day is insidious, as many journalists and professional performers are discovering in the age of White House shock tactics. They're realising that serious issues are never getting discussed, because the press spends all its time reacting to 'He tweeted what at three am?' This is not the way to run a world, and it's certainly not the way I want my mind organised.

I often see a photo of a prominent leader and ask, 'Who is that?' It isn't that I don't know the name. If the person is a US or world leader, I can probably tell you a lot about them. But I don't necessarily know if they're short or tall, thin or fat, bald or bushy-haired. Frankly, I don't really care, either. It comes of never watching television news.

You will make your own choices about what you let through your personal filters, of course. But I would urge you to think about whether somebody else is making that decision for you by default. Take steps to reclaim your own brain-space. This will make you a better writer, too.

PS: If you choose to click on that short maths film, I hope you enjoy it. You might want to pass the link on to your teacher/professor friends. They may reward you, as my sister did, with hair-raising anecdotes of their own. Please remember to share.

Writing Right with Dmitri Archive

Dmitri Gheorgheni

18.06.18 Front Page

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