Information As A Weapon of Mass Distraction

The modern education system is presented as the authority on education.

THE CULTURE OF INFORMATION addiction: Information as a weapon of mass distraction.

Many years ago, when I first returned to the U.S. from Trinidad, I remember regularly watching the game show “Jeopardy” with my mother. I recall how taken I was with the number of trivial facts, that the contestants on this show could remember. It was amazing how quickly they could turn their answers into the, “What is, Who is...” response phrase, that was the signature of this game show. I would even know some of the answers from time to time, to my amusement. I marveled at the steely poise, and robot-like accuracy these contestants exhibited in delivering the information they had stored in their brilliant minds. This played well to whatever fanciful images I had in mind of what genius might look like.

Since then, I have been exposed to more and more of this phenomenon, where an increasing amount of our environment is awash with sources and references to random information. The system has normalized consumerism in every aspect of human endeavor. Even information itself has been, over the last few decades, commercialized and marketed to us in all forms of media. Now, with popular internet search engines, we can instantly access information from a seemingly infinite number of sources.

What this appears to have generated is a sort of vicious dichotomy. On the one hand, it seems like a fairly harmless blossoming into the “information age” where just knowing the weather for the day can make a difference in how we plan for it, especially in these temperate climates. However, it has led to a rapidly degenerating society that suffers from the hyper-stimulation of information, valid or otherwise. The news media is a prime example. Such news outlets as well as other forms of mass media have been able to capitalize on our conditioning to be information junkies, getting our “fix” as we wake up to alarm clock radios, morning drive time shows, Facebook status updates, etc. Meanwhile, the front page of every major internet carrier and online news outlet regurgitates the “water cooler” talking points of the day. Then, instantly via Twitter, Facebook, Google plus or mobile text, we discuss these “latest developments” with others. We give passionate voice to our opinions on what we are inclined to treat as “the facts” about any given issue.

So one might ask, how can we have too much information and why should any of this be concerning? Well, it appears that as a result of all the information we are bombarded with, many of us have become armchair experts on the wide array of topics presented for our informed consumption. After all, we’ve learned that our opinions somehow count via the many blogs, social media sites and online publications mentioned previously. This abundance of information and our opinions on what is presented, gives this information further validity, if only in our minds. It is the energy spent in our reaction to it that has become a major source of our distraction. Rather than ask why we do not need to know all of these seemingly important facts, maybe we can ask, what is being missed while we focus our attention there. What are we missing, while we are formulating our opinions and making judgments about a given situation? What is happening while we are fostering the sense of self-importance and close-mindedness that being highly opinionated engenders?

Anything that takes our attention away from our duty to improve ourselves, in preparation for death, is a distraction. This education directs our attention to those existential questions that have intrigued humanity since our origins. Questions like, “who am I, why am I here and what happens when I die?” Answering these questions and fulfilling what the realization of those answers demand becomes the focus of our lives. We become aware that it is this focus on our purpose in life that actually prepares us for what happens after we die. Preparation for death then can be compared to studying for a final exam that determines the course of the rest of one’s existence. Can you imagine someone constantly distracting you while studying for such a major exam? How well do you think you will do? Now imagine that we have collectively been so distracted that we aren’t even aware that we should be preparing for this ultimate final exam.

Additionally, while we march along the path of our individual destinies deprived of the knowledge of our true purpose or even the inkling to inquire after it, we are also degenerating as a result. Fed on a diet of virtual reality, we can be led to believe that the only purpose behind life is to have fun, comfort and convenience. In seeking to fulfill our desires we, perhaps unwittingly, develop habits that are more destructive than anything else. We become more concerned with fulfilling our desires than considering the impact we have on our surroundings. In this way distractions, in the form of information among other things, act like additional fuel to aid in our decline both individually and collectively. The implications on the immediate and practical levels are seen in our poor health condition, as well as family, community, societal and environmental condition. Each arena of human endeavour in modern society can clearly be shown to be suffering the ill-effects of being distracted from our true purpose.

By now, we may see how information can be utilized to magnify our distraction from what is important. If we look closely, we might further deduce that to be “distracted” is to degenerate into self-destructive patterns of behavior. This is not to dismiss being informed all together. It is to suggest that we see “information” as a neutral phenomenon and that it can be used to hurt us just as easily as it can assist us. However, in the colonial world, we may be inclined to overlook this neutrality in favor of only its beneficial side. This tendency may emerge as a result of our exposure to an underlying theme found in the familiar saying, “Information is power” where having “information” is synonymous with being educated, thus empowered.

Whereas in traditional settings knowledge is always concrete and tends toward practical uses oriented around our true purpose; within colonial society, it is clear we are subject to the daily consumption of information, generally without much practical use. It is through this conditioning we develop the habit of pursuing information for information’s sake. Really, we as human beings don’t know much of anything. However, perhaps what is more disturbing is that we in the colonial world have not at least been given a basis for how to go about questioning our reality. The function of information becomes a kind of entertainment, a currency or resource in and of itself whose value is determined by its capacity to capture our attention, like the game show mentioned at the beginning of this article.

In the M’TAM education we understand that everything we observe transforms us. Master Naba explains that in this arena our method of exploration is not much different from that of a fly that comes to taste fresh milk; it almost always ends up becoming drunk, falling and drowning in the milk it came to taste. The irony is we’ve now managed to project yet another frontier within which to drown in the delight of self-indulgence. Sadly, we’ve done so under the glorified excuse of pursuing “knowledge” or being “informed”. Maybe it is time to re-examine our methods of investigation and the value we assign to what we discover, rather than drowning in the sea of phenomena much of which is being brought to us courtesy of the “modern information age”.