“The greatest curse brought down on us by technology is that it prevents us from escaping the present even for a brief time. Previous generations could retreat into solitude and seclusion when disaster struck; it was our fate to be aware of everything catastrophic happening anywhere in the world at the hour and the second when it happened.”
Stefan Zweig wrote these words in 1942 for his final work, The World of Yesterday: Memoirs of a European. Though it was written in the depths of the Second World War, it still lands.
What would Zweig have made of the internet age, and indeed, the AI age? If the flow of data, making everything known, is itself an inducer of stress upon the human being, then what becomes of us now?
The world is getting worse
An overriding attitude of our age is that the world is getting scarier. Threats are growing, the future is bleak and uncertain, people are fearful. It could be said that this is the modern condition.
Is it true, or is it merely a consequence of our widening perspective? If I know of every murder, every hurricane, every earthquake, every terrorist act, every disease outbreak, at the moment that it occurs, does this distort my sense of my reality?
If I never hear of these events, and they never touch my life, have they – as the philosopher might ask – really happened in my reality? Does the organism that is me feel any consequence?
Am I, by some chaos theory of the universe, still affected by a tsunami on the other side of the world, even if I don’t perceive it? Who knows. But clearly, my daily intake of news about the world has perceivable consequences.
I know, therefore I am
When I take in depressing or fear-inducing data, I become more likely to feel depressed or fearful. This seems fairly reasonable to assume. A well-adjusted adult can process the information objectively enough, others less easily so.
But we are all, by the drip, drip of steady increments, affected by the stream of data we must process. The organism’s hardware, if nothing else, is put under greater strain.
If Stefan Zweig, a deep thinker of the early 20th century, and presumably a fairly well-adjusted adult, could see the risks of perpetual data to himself in the 1940s, then the risks of our own age must be considerable.
Posing for every adult the question: how will I control what I know, and what will I do with that data that I do receive?
Read more? What is the real function of news?
