Drinking from the Digital “Fire Hose”
Drinking from the Digital “Fire Hose”
I wonder if you have ever felt this way. It seems that our digital world has, for some time, been a digital fire hose which is aimed at us constantly.
Every day, hundreds of emails pile into our inboxes. Our web browsers are filled with extraneous ‘noise’ in the form of advertising, sponsored news, pop-ups and all manner of irrelevant and distracting messages. While we are away from our screens, these just keep pouring in. Then, when we check for something important awaiting us, we have to run through the gauntlet of deleting the ridiculous amount of unwelcomed messages to get to something important to us.
For good or for bad, the digital age has brought us amazing benefits, such as the ability to meet and get to know people around the globe. People we would never meet in our daily, physical world.
But it has also enabled a darker side: The fire hose of “information” that blocks, hides, or distorts our perceptions of reality and importance. I suppose one could say this article is “just more noise”. That may be true, but for me, as I write this, it is a wake-up call to start filtering out that which is unimportant to me.
If you remember the movie, “Caddyshack”, there was a scene of a swimming pool with a floating Baby Ruth candy bar that was dropped in it, looking as though someone had a bodily accident in the pool. Everyone panics and leaves the pool.
When I started messing around with computers in the early 80’s, the Internet was still experimental; reserved for those in government who were building a means of communication between far-flung workers in different geographic locations. 36 years later, well, you know what we have today.
I’ve often felt that each time I sit down at my computer to see what is happening, I am swimming in a sewer of garbage and other “effluence”, in search of a Baby Ruth bar. Do you feel this way, too? How can we become discerning filters of truth, when we are overwhelmed by garbage?
I can’t claim to know the answer, but perhaps half the battle is at least seeing our digital lives for what it is, and filtering out the 99.999% of irrelevant, inaccurate, and increasingly growing amount of digital sewage each of us face each day. As they say, 50% of the battle is won when we acknowledge we first realize we have a problem. The other 50% comes when we take steps to do something about it.