Too Much Information: Or: Can Everyone Just Shut Up for a Moment, Some of Us Are Trying to Think
Dave Gorman
Language: English
Pages: 352
ISBN: 0091928508
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
It’s hard to imagine a world where anything you could possibly want to know about—and everything you don’t even know you want to know about—isn't accessible 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with just a few taps of our fingers. But that world once existed. And Dave Gorman remembers it. He remembers when there were only three channels on TV. He remembers when mobile phones were the preserve of arrogant estate agents and yuppie twonks. And he remembers when you had to unplug your phone to plug the computer into the landline in order to use the (cripplingly slow) internet. Nowadays of course, the world is full of people trying to tell us things. So much so that we have taught our brains not to pay much attention. After all, click the mouse, tap the screen, flick the channel, and it's on to the next thing. But Dave Gorman thinks it's time to have a closer look, to find out how much nonsense we tacitly accept. Suspicious ads, baffling newspaper headlines, fake Twitter, endless cat videos, insane TV shows where the presenters ask the same questions over and over—can we even hear ourselves think over the rising din? Or is there just too much information?
is just 7 millimetres tall! The whole story occupies a space roughly 3 cm by 2 cm. If the following shape represents a page of the paper, the black rectangle contained within it shows you how much of the page it was given – and whereabouts on the page it was placed. I’ve tried to work out why the Sun would run this particular story five months late. It’s not as if they’d ignored the DSK saga up until this point. They’d given him plenty of column inches just like everyone else. And they must
This is an odd story all round. Mainly in its blandness. It doesn’t seem to me to be properly tut-worthy and if a one-sentence story doesn’t elicit that reaction, I’m not sure what purpose it’s supposed to possess. Schoolboys? Darts? Arses? ‘Tsk! Tut! What’s the world coming to?’ I understand. A man fell out of a taxi and the driver didn’t even know about it! ‘Bloody hell! Can you imagine it!’ I get it. But I’m not sure some royal knitwear selling for £440 strikes me as particularly odd. I
up by – drum roll, please – just £15. They had received two donations that day. That’s just two donations that might – or might not – have come about because of those celebrity retweets. Fifteen quid is not to be sniffed at. It’s definitely better than nothing. But put it in context. They were putting six hours a day into Twitter and had gone through four fallow days before this one. So the best-case scenario is that 30 hours of tweeting had raised an extra fifteen quid. I don’t think 50 pence an
Keith would tell the story and Janet would blush. There might be an element of luck involved in the game, but essentially it would be a general knowledge quiz in disguise and at the end of it the triumphant couple would win a small hatchback. A car was the biggest prize imaginable back then although, if you were unlucky, you might find yourself competing for a caravan instead. That must have been especially galling if you didn’t actually own a car. Imagine having to find another game show to go
links. I also asked @CesarCaste if he could tell me how much money had been spent on the campaign and if he knew how effective it had been … but predictably enough he too didn’t reply. MyLikes sells itself as a place where ordinary people can use their Twitter accounts to earn a few bucks by linking to content that’s exactly the sort of thing they’d have linked to anyway. And I’m sure there must be examples out there where this has happened. But I can’t find one. I’ve looked at dozens of the