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By default and without much thought, it has been decided for us that communications ought to be cheap, easy, and quick. Accordingly, more and more of us are instantly wired to the global nervous system with cell phones, beepers, pagers, fax machines, and e-mail. Though this wiring is useful in real emergencies, the overall result is to homogenize the important with the trivial, making everything an emergency and making an already frenetic civilization even more so. We are drowning in unassimilated information, most of which fits no meaningful picture of the world. In our public affairs and in our private lives we are increasingly muddleheaded because we have mistaken volume and speed of information for substance and clarity.
It is time to consider the possibility that -- for the most part -- communication ought to be somewhat slower, more difficult, and more expensive than it is now. Beyond some relatively low threshold, the rapid movement of information works against the emergence of knowledge, which requires time to mull things over, to test results, to change perceptions and behavior. The clockspeed of genuine wisdom, which requires the integration of many different levels of knowledge, is slower still. Only over generations, through a process of trial and error, can knowledge eventually congeal into cultural wisdom about the art of living well within the resources, assets, and limits of a place.
-- David Orr
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