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Transcription of interview with David Shenk on December 3, 2012.
Douglas Goldstein, CFP®, Financial Planner & Investment Advisor
David Shenk is the best-selling author of the books The Genius in All of Us, The Forgetting,
Data Smog and the Immortal Game.
Douglas Goldstein, financial planner & investment advisor, interviewed Shenk on Arutz Sheva
Radio.
Douglas Goldstein: Back in 1997, you wrote a book called Data Smog. What does Data Smog
mean?
David Shenk: Data Smog was my term which now looks some impressions all the way back in
the 90s, somewhat tongue-in-cheek term for this idea of information pollution obviously.
The insight which I basically stole from other people as all good writers do is that for
almost all of the history of human civilization until very recently, the big challenge was
to get enough information to live our lives. The communication was very difficult, getting
information that could support our basic life was always very difficult and that was the
challenge and it was also very expensive.
Suddenly, over a period of a couple of decades, 70s, 80s, 90s, we have this transformation
where suddenly information became very fast and very cheap. Some of the good stuff is
still hard to get, but we suddenly flipped over from a time of information scarcity to
an era of information proliferation that is just overwhelming. Of course we still all
need good information and we'd want great communication to live safe and rich lives,
but suddenly being a human being in the information world is very different. Instead of forging
for that beautiful morsel of information and working over tons of money for it, it's
a matter almost always now of weeding through tons and tons of information to get the stuff
that you really need. Information management and a real huge key of this is resisting the
distraction because we're living a very distracting world now where information is
also become entertainment. The book Data Smog and the book that came after that, the End
of Patience, were both about this relatively new challenge and trying to help people think
through making this transition. Personally, family-wise, socially, politically, all the
different ways that we need to kind of re-think the world we're living now that we're
in an age of information abundance and tremendous info distraction.
Douglas Goldstein: One of the topics in the book you pointed out that in 1971, the average
American was targeted by about 500 advertising messages and 20 years later, they get about
300 advertising messages per day. A lot of us have simply learned the technique of ignoring
everything, so is this really a problem?
David Shenk: First of all, let me stress because this is a very new ones topic. In my book
and whenever I talk about this, I try to very quickly make the point that I'm not saying
that all this technology is bad, the information revolution is bad. On the whole, it is a wonderful
thing. It's a part of human progress. There are innumerable advances. We could spend hours
and hours, days and days, weeks and weeks talking about all the great stuff that comes
from information technology and the new speed of information so I'm not putting down the
shift.
What I'm saying is that in the context of this wonderful shift which does bring us progress
in all sorts of ways, there are all sorts of amazing challenges and I respect you if
you think it's not a problem for your life but I think yes, there are just fundamental
challenges that we do deal with on a personal level and on a social and political level
as well. One example of that is we live in this cacophonous world now where politics
seems to get louder and even more crass year by year and same with just kind of the news
entertainment complex and people that known that and they say maybe that has something
to do with values, but what it really has to do with is just the difficulty of getting
people's attention and it's just more and more difficult to get people's attention
because there are more and more people producing information and coming up with inventive ways
to get people's attention.
The final resource here of course is time and attention. Our attention span does not
increase. We still have to sleep the same amount. We still have lots of work to do during
the day. Time is exactly the same as it was 50 years ago but there are a lot more people
competing for our attention now and as a result of that, we do live in a very distracting
world, a cacophonous world, a world where people who make the loudest noise tend to
get not only power from that but also become very wealthy from getting people's attention
by making the loudest noise and that's an incentive program that presents a problem
for all of us I believe.
Douglas Goldstein: In Data Smog, you spoke about virtual anarchy as the result of too
much data and you spoke about the problems that a culture has with constant upgrades
or so many statistics. One of the things you also noted was what you referred to us hyperspecialization.
This is all sort of under the umbrella of virtual anarchy. These were things you spoke
about decades ago. Do you think that a lot of these have actually come true?
David Shenk: It's funny while I was writing the book early on, kind of the first half
of two to three-year process and for about a year when I was researching and writing
the book and again a lot of that is I was calling from other people who know this subject
and who have done research on it realized that people had been making observations like
this for many decades. If I had an original contribution, it was to pull a lot of stuff
together and to put some hopefully clever names on it and organize a little bit and
find a way to get people's attention around the idea. I was also very lucky because the
book came out in the mid to late 90s when the internet was really suddenly becoming
a very popular phenomenon so the book caught the attention of the media to become a bit
of a hip topic for a little while. Unfortunately, most of the stuff that I talked about in the
book which I wrote in the mid 90s, anyone could've predicted, become just more so
over the years and I actually am besieged with emails from people saying, "You wrote
that so long ago and when are you going to write the update."
Douglas Goldstein: What it's going to look like in another 10 or 20 years? What's your
thought on that?
David Shenk: I think the answer is things are going to get better and worse. As I said
before, there are so many benefits from the information age, we don't need to spend
time talking about this because there are all this commercial interest that do such
a good job at pointing them out and so many of them are obvious. It's the challenges,
it's the drawbacks and it's the adjustments that we all have to make that are not always
so obvious. All I'm suggesting is that people pay a little bit more attention to the drawbacks
and the adjustments they have to make in their lives and to fairly regularly ask themselves
whether these adjustments are worth it, whether or not they are being actually kind of pulled
along by all these thrilling technology and I ask that question all the time too. I think
what it comes down to is you look at the tools you're using and you look at the life that
you lead with those tools and you ask yourself, "Is this the life I want to be living or
are there are some adjustments I want to make again to kind of pull back from some of these
things to compensate for some of the ways that I'm being kind of pulled along by all
these thrilling tools in order to live the fullest richest life that I want to live."
Douglas Goldstein: The American culture really loves quantity much more often than quality.
If that's the personality of the culture that we're dealing with, is there really
any possibility that people would be willing to give up on getting more information?
David Shenk: For sure we live in a consumer culture and we all crave more and more and
somehow it did sound like kind of a radical and put this in a psychological way but there
is something to kind of we all want to fill the hole in our lives, we all want to feel
like we're living a rich life and one kind of quick easy way to get that thrilling feeling
is to buy something or to shoot off an email or to get a text message. There's a quick
thrill with either buying or communicating very quickly with someone or getting a quick
fix on the internet. All these things are thrilling.
What I find is that when you segment this out in terms of demographics, you look at
the people who have the most education, who have the most resources, who are able to have
a little bit more time to reflect on their lives and to make slightly smarter choices.
Those are the people who actually realize, "I need to pull back. I need to have some
quiet space in my day. I need to have some reflection. I need to turn off this machine.
I need to have some time to reflect on my own priorities and do that with my family,
my wife and kids." It's interesting to see that people with resources and with education
end up making smarter choices and use all these tools constantly. We also are a little
better at saying, "You know what, let's pullback, let's make sure that we're not
letting the tools take over our lives and we're calling the shots here."
I think just again to go back to another cliché, people need to be educated and education is
the silver bullet. The more people get educated, the more they're able to make wise and more
deliberate decisions to plan, farther in advance for their careers and all their personal decisions.
The more reflective they get, the better off they're going to be. We know that. That's
how they do better in their careers and that's how they make better decisions in our personal
lives. That's how we make better decisions, health decisions, we live longer. It's the
key to a better and longer and richer life and part of that is taking a really close
look at the technologies we use and the speed of information. There's nothing wrong with
being thrilled by information, diving in and just kind of having the cheap thrill of listen
to the shock jock sometimes or just following a gossip blog or whatever, but not letting
that take over your life, not letting that distract you from the important work that
needs to be done and the important thinking, that's the key.
Douglas Goldstein: How can people continue to follow your work?
David Shenk: My website is www.davidshenk.com and you'll see all my books on there and
all my articles too. Thanks for writing one who wants to take a closer look and please
get in touch with me and let me know what you think. There's an email where you can
email me right from that site.
Douglas Goldstein, CFP®, is the director of Profile Investment Services and the host
of the Goldstein on Gelt radio show (Monday nights at 7:00 PM on www.israelnationalradio.com.
He is a licensed financial professional both in the U.S. and Israel. Securities offered
through Portfolio Resources Group, Inc., Member FINRA, SIPC, MSRB, NFA, SIFMA. Accounts carried
by National Financial Services LLC. Member NYSE/SIPC, a Fidelity Investments company.
His book Building Wealth in Israel is available in bookstores, on the web, or can be ordered
at: www.profile-financial.com (02) 624-2788 or (03) 524-0942.
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