The Disinformation Age

By Crispin Sartwell

In the world of information theory, 'information' is defined as a reduction in uncertainty. Here's what that means. Let's say that you ask someone whether she wants pickled pigs' feet for dinner. A "yes" or "no" answer is informative because it eliminates the other possibilities and hence reduces your uncertainty.

Information is opposed to four things: silence, redundancy, noise, and stalling. If she doesn't respond, that's no help. If she says "yes, yes, yes," the second and third yesses don't convey any new info: they're redundant. If she responds with a series of inarticulate grunts while running the blender, that's noise. And if she keeps saying "maybe" right up until dinner time, that's stalling, and no better than the other three.

We have all heard it said continually that we live in the Age of Information. But that very sentence is a demonstration of its own falsity. After the first, say, six hundred times you heard it, I daresay you found it redundant. It's just something that a politician or corporate leader says when there's no other convenient way to make sounds.

During the presidential debates, the candidates strove to create a perfectly information-sterile environment in which neither said anything, but rather simply murmured for the nth time their little catchphrases, which for Gore included "information age." I wonder what the phrase "reformer with results" ever meant, not to speak of what it meant after the first week or two of saturation. It was pure stall, intended to defer the fulfillment of the obligation to say something.

This isn't the age of information. It's the age of redundancy, noise, and stalling. When I was following the Elian Gonzalez case, for example, I'd read the stories on the miamiherald.com, then see the same story on MSNBC and CNN. People were glued to their sets as the same facts were recited and the same bits of tape played over and over. I watch the Ravens beat the Titans. The Ravens return a blocked field goal for a touchdown. I watch the replay three times. Then twice again at halftime. Then twice again on SportsCenter.

My son Hayes likes to go to sleep with the television on, the stereo playing r&b and his little fan going. He's completely surrounded by noise and obtaining no information whatever. In fact, our whole house is an environment approaching pure noise. The kids are trying to do their math while they watch episode 119 of the Rugrats for the 37^th time on the bigscreen tv. Meanwhile, I've got the stereo on African reggae (I don't really get the words, plus I'm listening through the Rugrats) while the clothes dryer and dishwasher are going. Conversation consists of meaningless catch-phrases: Vincie likes to say "Yo. You talking to me?" Hayes for some reason has taken to saying "Martin Grammatica" over and over, and the fact that this is the name of the place-kicker for the Tampa Bay Bucs does not seem to give any keys to his motivation or intent. Meanwhile we all tell baby Jane (who can't understand) for the eightieth time that day: "you're so *cute,*" or just make googly noises at her. She responds "babababababa."

The rest of our day is devoted to acting out scenes from "Dude, Where's my Car?"

Here's an Instant Message conversation between my daughter Emma and a friend, verbatim.

Girl#one: hey

Dog*star: hey WAZ^

Girl#one: nmh u

Dog*star: nm

Girl#one: on sunday im 13

Girl#one: :-)

Dog*star: awesome

Girl#one: yea

Girl#one: lol

Girl#one: y is ur sn dog*star?

Girl#one: g2g

Girl#one: bye

Dog*star: bye have a kewl bday

Dog*star signed off at 9:35:06 PM.

Dog*star signed on at 9:46:30 PM.

Dog*star signed off at 9:52:27 PM.

Maybe they would have said something if not for the "pos" (parent over shoulder) problem. But I doubt it.

Now comes the part where we deplore the abominable state of our noisy culture, yes? No. Instead, I offer what I believe to be an entirely new theory of communication, perhaps the first to make any sense of our mass addiction to nonsense. It is embodied in Sartwell's Law: *Communication is inversely proportional to information.* Thus, while we have entered an era of unprecedented redundancy, noise, and stalling, we have also entered the golden era of communication.

Communication has always essentially been noise, redundancy, and stalling. Think about the most ordinary and the most intense experiences of communication that you've had. The ritual greetings of our culture are of course completely uninformative. "Hey! How ya doin?" "Can't complain. You?" That has nothing at all to do with messages, but rather with establishing a kind of mutual presence.

Or think of lovemaking. It can be one of the most intense forms of human communion, and it's true that some actual messages can be sent back and forth. But that is not the point: the point is really just to be there with one another in a merger of sound, gesture, touch, movement.

Another example is improvisational music. When a good jam session is in progress, the communication between the players is genuinely articulate: it starts kind of random until a movement coalesces and sweeps each person up into it and then they are together perfectly; after that, it slowly disintegrates. There are intense communications traded among two players, among each player and the whole group, between the whole group and the whole group. They are moved together into an extremely elaborate situation of mutual presence.

Communication is communion, and communion between people cannot be achieved by a mere swap of information. When you're trying fundamentally to convey a message, the exchange is stilted, officious, superficial. The instructions for filling out the 1040 EZ are an information-rich environment but a Sahara of communication.

Media experience is no different in this regard. We watch television, listen to the stereo, lurk on the net in order to bathe ourselves continually in human communication, in order to be continually present to one another. The media (by definition) reduce the immediacy of that presence, but they do not eliminate it. The identification, for example, of an early-sixties Beatles' fans with the group and with each other had nothing to do with the information contained in the phrase "Love Me Do," if any, as conveyed on vinyl or over the radio. It has to do with a shared environment of compelling noise. "Love" lends a kind of resonance or mood to the recording, but hauls no cargo of information.

A study released last year showed that people who spend a lot of time on the internet are more likely to feel more isolated and depressed than others. But such a study needs to be performed frequently, because the technology keeps getting us further toward intimacy and mutual presence. The ever-increasing pervasion of instant-messaging technology is one example of this, but so are webcams and voice transmissions.

Emoticons are little faces with various expressions, either compounded out of punctuation marks, as in Emma's message above, or selected from ever-larger menus on the IM program. They represent an important advance in human communication. They are meant to convey emotional inflection, gesture, or tone of voice, which do not always have anything to do directly with information. The more noise that can be handled through electronic channels, the greater their communicative capacities. Before long, extraordinary intimacies will be possible through electronic media.

Now the one possible cloud on the horizon of our happy Disinformation Age is that there is less and less silence. First of all, you can't communicate without silence: there had better be gaps between the words or images, moments of rest when you're not being being bombarded, and frequencies that are not filled. Silence is a resource that we're strip-mining, and if we lose enough of it we won't be able to sustain ourselves.

And in the long run, because communication is about human contact and human presence, we're not going to be able to live without getting our actual bodies into proximity with one another. That's good.

But it's also worth noting that all this electronic noise is made by people for people. The technology is saturated by the human and becomes more human the more we work on it and reach each other through it. It's often said that we live in an age in which we are bombarded by information, but nothing is further from the truth. We live in an age in which we relentlessly pursue perfect redundancy because we love it, and one another, inordinately. So go ahead: hang on to some silence, but baste happily also in the beautiful noise.

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