The recent assassination of an important figure has gotten me thinking about how we receive our news. This figure was important in many ways but I was unfamiliar with him. I did not recognize the name when the tragedy of his death was digitally broadcast. The fact that I had not known of him, until then, is not intended as a suggestion of his unimportance, but it does leave me wondering about the mechanisms by which we remain informed. His death has dominated the news. It has caused significant upheaval in peoples’ lives yet, within the streams of information that I usually receive, he never received prominent mention, until now.

This has made me realize how much pre-selection occurs in the news that I am daily being fed. That we all are being fed, I must assume. Why does one’s news stream bring certain things to one’s attention but leave other things aside? “Dog bites man is not news, but man bites dog is.” News items must be timely, novel, significant, interesting, and impactful to sell copy. However, one person’s death becomes headlines while another’s is left unmentioned. Here, the element of significance plays the most important role. But who decides what is significant?

Leonard Peltier has lately granted an interview since being released from prison. That was an item in the news stream I am following. I began wondering, was this also considered significant in the news stream of people who don’t receive their information through the same channels that I do? Are they as ignorant of him, as I had been of the individual who has prompted this line of questioning?

The term “information silo” comes to mind. I think we are all trapped in them and don’t see any easy way to escape. Someone must curate the information we receive. We live in an era in which we have a surfeit of it, more than any single person can digest. No one can drink from a fire hose. What we receive meets the criteria for saleable news but it’s tailored, I suspect, to sentiments that are known, beforehand, to trigger a reaction in our particular group. Unfortunately, such a situation is rife with the potential for the ulterior manipulation of our emotions.

We live in a time now referred to as the Information Age. I would like to suggest that name be changed to the Too Much Information Age. Perhaps it’s just my own limitations being exposed here. When I was younger, a book called “Future Shock” was published, written by Alvin Toffler. It was a best-seller and I read parts of it, at least enough to be familiar with its premise, which was that change was accelerating exponentially and humans, with our caveman brains, were ill-equipped to deal with it.

Along with the growth of new technologies come changes in our ways of doing things, together with growth of the information needed to help us adjust to those changes. One of his observations was that, because of the increasing pace of innovation, a teenager in 1970 would find themself in a dizzying situation where: “by the time the individual reaches old age the society around him will be producing thirty-two times as much as when he was born.” That’s 32 times as much goods, services and information. I was that teenager then and am that oldster now. I freely admit to often feeling overwhelmed by the changes I am exposed to.

One of his other observations gives me even greater pause. Toffler argued for a more measured approach to technological innovation by suggesting really nothing more than that the engine of change ought to possess a pair of brakes. Societies that adopted an approach that didn’t allow change, and information, to roll over them unchecked, would preserve their capacity for broad-scale democratic participation. However, in societies that blindly acquiesced to runaway innovation, he warned: “powerful pressures [would] lead toward political rule by a tiny techno-managerial elite.” I wonder how each of those two possible futures are playing themselves out in our world right now.

Philip Lussier is a retired educator who lives in Ashfield.