Image credit: Jean Scheijen

We live in an age of immediacy. At our fingertips is a broad array of information, products, and entertainment, all of it available virtually instantaneously. Want to know about the history of Livia’s involvement in the Julio-Claudian age of emperors? No sweat–you google it, or you go to Amazon and order a book, and it’s at your house a couple days later. Want to know what movie reviewers in Taipei think about Tropic Thunder? Go online and read the review. Want to grow a bansai tree in your backyard? Go to a nearby nursery. Want to see this weeks Question Time in the British House of Commons? Flip on C-Span.

This immediacy has enormous benefits. Broader access to information accelerates self-education. The ability to ship products in just a couple of days saves people time and unnecessary planning, which also helps to prevent economic downturns from becoming full-blown depressions. And the onslaught of constant information in our daily lives and our careers makes us more flexible and adaptable to new situations.

But there’s a down side, as well. In an age of instantaneous information, we come to expect instantaneous results. We’re irritated if our package from Amazon comes a day late. We get upset that our new plan of diet and exercise doesn’t give us the body we want in a month. We sell stocks when, after getting a new CEO, a company’s earnings our down in the first quarter he’s in charge. We’re don’t understand why the brand new coach can’t turn around a team that’s been losing for a decade in just one season, so we demand he be fired. We become impatient on spending too long a time on any one thing.

We also live in an age of specialization. Division of labor has gotten to the point where we don’t have doctors–we have podiatrists, gynecologists and dermatologists. We don’t have lawyers–we have litigators, M&A attorneys, and patent attorneys. We don’t have physicists, biologists, and chemists. We have persons who study the genetic structure of one species of mollusk; chemists who work exclusively with certain substances, etc. The same holds true for many professions, but it particularly applies to the more intellectually oriented ones.

This has a number of benefits, as well. Specialists can become true experts at what they do, enabling greater and faster technological innovation and advancement, as well as a greater and faster expansion of knowledge. But this has a downside, too. The propagation of specialization diminishes our ability to see the big picture, and make connections between widely varying subjects. Specialization also results in tunnel vision–where the importance of the problems and benefits of an area you know well get blown out of proportion of society as a whole.

What’s worse is that when you couple the instant access to that expert information, you wind up with a whole class of people who think that a few articles in Wikipedia and a quick Google search can give them enough information in about an hour to be an expert on any subject. This can lead to a lot of bad wisdom on a subject–not too mention a very change in the way people think. In a recent essay for The Atlantic Monthly, Nicholas Carr explains just how widespread information affects his ability to think:

[W]hat the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

This quick absorption of information has its benefits. It helps keep the mind from being trapped in a rut and accelerates awareness of new ideas. The problem is that it also makes it more of a challenge to understand the context of the information we receive.

That said, the net result of our information age, from the invention of the radio onward, is a society that is flexible, adaptable, and capable of coming up with ingenious solutions to problems, resulting in a huge array of art, entertainment, technology, and business practice.

But it also results in a society in which patience and big picture thinking is undervalued and underpracticed, specialists who know a lot about a few things, and those who have the illusion that the know a lot about many things, when in fact they’ve only skimmed the surface of a number of topics.

How, then, can we combine the benefits and flexibility of the information age with the thoughtfulness and contemplation of times past? The answer, of course, lies in moderation, the cultivation of patience, and a focus on context. Tempting as it is to skim headlines, more understanding is gained by taking the time to read articles, books, magazines, etc. But even more important than that is to focus on the big picture of new information.

The news today, as we receive on TV, the radio, and the web, is by nature short bursts of information. One of the benefits of the internet is that we are capable of very quickly gathering more complete information on a topic and look at it in a broader context. That means asking the all important question: Why? Why is this happening?

For example, if you read about a new medical breakthrough in the news, it’s pretty meaningless. Sure, you might learn that a glass of beer a day has some health benefits. But if you want to know the best way to incorporate beer into your diet, you have to dig a little deeper. The nice thing about the information age is that you can find that information at home. The bad part is that because the web is so geared towards instant gratification, you have to apply some focus and attention in finding what you need. But if you do, it pays off.

Forcing ourselves to dig deeper–to look not just at the days headlines and blog posts, but really dig into the cause of today’s headlines, is essential for a complete understanding of the world around us. But we can’t rely on content providers to hand that information away–we have to find it for ourselves. The up side of our Age of Immediacy is that we can find that information at our own home in short order. The down side is that the lack of patience and irritation that the Age of Immediacy has given us makes it ever harder to do.

Still, we have to try. Our Age of Immediacy has produced a number of wonderful things–flexible, adaptable thinking, instant access to knowledge, and a number of people who truly know a great deal about certain subjects. If these benefits could be combined with the virtues of patience and big-picture thinking, it would be revolutionary–for society as a whole and for people as individuals.