Is noise the message?

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We are swimming. Many of us are swimming hard. We are swimming up a river, against the current. With every stroke, we are being carried away in the flow, treading hard to keep our head up—to keep from drowning.

You’ve probably heard somewhere that we are living in the ‘information age’ or the ‘media age.’ Perhaps, you have noticed how, to keep up, you have to really struggle. I’ll put you a bit at ease, you can’t. You must pick and choose what information you wish to consume. These days, you need to also make sure you select good information.

We are all surrounded by plenty of information, but how much of it is valuable, useful, accurate, or even true? That’s right, not all information is good for you. Somewhere in all the information you must daily sift through is the message. The message is the content and meaning that is being communicated to you by another person or group of people and is also of importance and worth to you. When the amount of information and the number of messages increases, you need to determine what is most important and of greatest value to you.

You might now be asking, what is the other information? That is, what about all the less important and less value or of less worth information? Well, it is noise. Just like useless sounds that get in the way of you hearing something you want to hear, there is information that is noise. You need to learn to ignore it. It will waste your time and draw you away from increasing your knowledge, skills, understanding and wisdom in the way you truly want.

When I watch TV, I don’t want to watch commercials. They are there to cleverly try to persuade me to buy a product or service. I flip to something else. I have to be careful. It is too easy to get lost, even mesmerized into watching useless TV shows that really have little or no value or interest to me. The same goes for music, in fact any information from any media. We all need to be critically thinking about what we are consuming and how it is affecting us.

OK, I have covered valuable and useful. What about accurate and true information? You will have to keep in mind that life is about quality, not quantity. You will be better off if you take the time to verify information rather than believe it and move on because you will never get through everything you want.

How can you verify information? Stick with reliable sources. There are reasons why traditional news sources are worthy, however, you can, and should verify those too with other sources. Be careful not to spread inaccurate or false information. You have a responsibility to not be part of the problem. So, have a variety of sources that you feel are accurate. Read, listen and watch with a critical mind. Don’t believe everything as truth unless you are sure. Don’t believe everything just because it is on TV. As the old saying goes, ‘…trust everyone, but always cut the deck.’ That is, make a final check before you bet.

Remember, machines can hold information, your goal is to grow in that which makes you more human than a machine—wisdom. Wisdom might be gained from the assimilation of the best of information into knowledge and understanding blended with real life experiences. Tune out the noise and listen to the message. Take time to link it to what you already know. In this way you can come to understand the message better.

Perhaps, it is like food. If you eat a lot of foods, some will be good, some not so good. Keep eating a lot and you will get quite a bit of good food, however, you will get more bad food and that food will make you unhealthy. If you can identify what is good for you and eat mostly that food, you will be healthy. I think your mind works much the same way, with the goal of healthy wisdom.

Is this old school? Some people might argue that the world has changed. That there is too much to learn these days. They would say that, as you immerse yourself in the sea of information, the message will get through. In the same way, instead of studying an image, such as a painting, one would view many, perhaps hundreds, of images to get the message.

Is noise part or all of the message? Depending on the situation, the amount of noise in relation to the message might reach well over 90 percent. That’s a lot of noise and a lot of time to filter out the noise. Check the speed of images that are flashed before you on TV. Like viewing billboards from a fast moving train. Can we gain wisdom from quantity? Can we get the message from among the noise? Maybe what’s important will stand out, no matter what the flow of information. The human mind might be able to sift and sort out that which can bring wisdom, despite the noise. The noise is certainly going to do something though. It seems clear that this is a situation of us being kept busy and overwhelmed—not in control.
Should we care? Why not simply go with the flow? Why not just see where we end up and enjoy the trip? Well, that is not how humans ha

Should we let technology carry us away, down the river into the info-abyss of information, perhaps making us less human through the erosion of what makes us more human than a machine—wisdom.ve acted in the past. There is something about us that wants to be in control. It is a survival mechanism.

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Getting work done

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My daughter, who is away at university, texted me from her iPhone to my old iPhone. Her majors are in English and Creative Writing, so she has plenty of reading and writing to do. Today, she announced that she was in a coffee shop with her boyfriend and was “getting work done.” It flies in the face of what I was told and grew up doing, is against the research into how people can best learn. I know, because I studied education, training and learning to the level of a Masters of Education. Yet, this is how young people ‘get work done.’ The more they have going on, the better, or so it seems.

A few months ago, I caught an interview with a few young folk and they were asked how they do their homework and studies. The interviewer began with asking how many do only their homework. No hands went up. Next, they were asked if they do two things at once. Still no hands. He continued with three and I think I saw someone hesitantly put their hand part way up. I think most claimed they did about five things at once, including their studies.

So, the interviewer decided to find out if this is common and if there is any proof that this sort of practice resulted in lower grades in school. Sure enough, they managed to find a researcher who stated that the research is showing that grades are not impacted when students do more than one thing at a time when studying.

I have a couple of concerns. I am still not convinced, nevertheless, even if it should prove out over time, what does this say about where society is heading? Certainly, there are messages, such as advertizing, that are designed and meant to be consumed in an instant. We can see how much faster advertizing is presented compared with a decade or two ago. Particularly, advertizing aimed at young people. And the culture, for example the music of young people, is presented rapidly. It is almost as if, it is not the message itself that is important, it is the overall impression it leaves that matters.

My conclusion then is that the message must be superficial, since there is no time to really take-in the entire message. It is there and gone before one can even think about it. Therein lies a huge problem. Learning and understanding and finally wisdom come from critical thinking. It’s not just taking the time to think about and think through information, but, to also think about what you think about it and to critically examine the information, the message, what is behind the message and how it affects you the consumer of the information.

Let me put forward that intelligence and wisdom do not come from the quantity of information, but, from the quality and depth of thought that arises from it. Yes, there are very ‘smart’ people these days, doing amazing things. Yet, is seems as if we as humans, know so much about many things, and understand so little, particularly, who we are.

What if we, humankind, are on the verge of a massive paradigm shift that takes us away from a deep connection through critical thought and dialog with the information we create. Perhaps, our brain might catch up one day, or more likely, since we rely more each day on technology, that we may develop computers that might sift and organize our information into capsules that synthesize what we need to know. A machine that tells us what we need to know. It sounds sinister in some ways. What if we simply invent ourselves into a lifestyle that has all our needs met through various technologies and we simply have to enjoy life. This is the myth I grew up with, as western societies passed the mid-point of the twentieth century.

It was a myth in that, as the twentieth century was entering its final couple of decades, we seemed to be working harder to pay for the technologies that we had come to rely on and we found we were generating more information daily than we could ever consume. It has turned out that we can only pick small snippets here and there. Perhaps, it is these small pickings are what will make us individuals, or who we are. Like careening down a track on a super fast train, we try to look out of all the windows to see the scenery. In a matter of minutes, we pass through a section of countryside and claim that we have seen the country, yet, we have only seen snippets along a track that, in no way, passes through the entire country. Who is to say we have or have not seen enough?

I have been practicing. This has been written while watching TV. As a movie plays on the TV, I write and look up every now and then and I listen as I go. Well, I do manage, as you can read, to get something written, however, I don’t feel that I am really thinking deeply as I construct each sentence. My writing, may be shallow compared to what I might write if I were in a quiet room and focusing.

People claim that they can multitask and still do each task well. I am not convinced, but as I said, I am trying. I’m not up to doing five things at once and I don’t even think I will get there or want to. I have managed, though, to get this done.

What do you think? Do you multitask? How do you get work done?