I’ve spent much of the past three months trying not to stay current with football, and it has been harder than I thought it would be.

Image Credit: lecates

Since I live in Asia, a live game starting at noon on Sunday is on at 3:00 a.m. Monday morning.  Not prime viewing time.  So, with the help of my semi-reliable slingbox,  I record the games on a friend’s DVR and watch them the next day.  I watch college games on Sunday, and NFL games Monday and Tuesday night.

At the beginning of the season, I thought that if I just stayed away from sites like Sports Illustrated and ESPN, I would be fine.  Oh, how wrong I was.  I checked the New York Times to read the op-eds, and there was the score of the Giants game I was planning to watch.  I logged out of my email, and there was a score on the MSN homepage.  I stopped doing Yahoo searches, because they have scores on their homepage (I know, everyone else stopped years ago, but I’m stubborn).

There are scores everywhere.  I have to block the ESPN crawl, since I sometimes watch games out of order.  Announcers will drop references to the previous games without warning, or pop up a handy graphic with the standings, updated to show the result of the game I was going to watch that afternoon.  I even had a score ruined in the comments section of an internet games site.

Obviously, my situation is somewhat unique.  Yet I’m far from the only person to have a DVR.  Many people now record games and shows to watch at their convenience (and skip those inane commercials- you can watch an NFL game in 2 hours on the DVR).

Surely I’m not the only person who doesn’t want to know the score right away?

The problem goes deeper than just sports scores.  Everywhere you look, there is information, and much of it is information that I don’t want to know.

As everyone on earth now knows, Tiger Woods got caught having an affair.  Personally, I don’t worry about who Tiger Woods sleeps with, be it man, woman or goat.  It’s none of my business, I don’t care, and I don’t want to know.  Nonetheless, I now have far too much information about his private life, because it has been printed in large headlines on every news and sports outlet for the past week.

Here’s another example.  I know who K-Fed is.  I don’t want to.  I think he is a waste of oxygen.  Still, I know who he is.  Can’t avoid it.  I know that Brittney Spears shaved her head.  I’ve even heard some of her music, and I didn’t do anything to deserve that.  I know Paris Hilton and Lindsey Lohan and any number of other celebrities whose lives I could barely care less about.  I’m going to make an error on my taxes one day because the section of the brain that held the instructions for filling out a 1040A has been cleared out to make room for celebrity gossip.

I don’t even have a television, and still I’m flooded with information that I don’t want.  I don’t want to know the scores of games I haven’t seen yet, but I see them.  I don’t want to know about people’s affairs, but I do.  I don’t want to know about the latest superficial debutante, but still I hear of them.

To make things worse, the information flood is asymmetrical.  I want to ignore much of pop culture, but it seeps through.  Meanwhile, my girlfriend remains blissfully unaware of sports.  I was shocked last week when she didn’t know who Bobby Bowden was.  The man is an icon.  I think that if I have to know about Lady Gaga, then she should know about Bobby Bowden.  It’s only fair.

Many people celebrate the Information Age, and it does have its advantages (like letting me record football games and watch them from 7500 miles away).  But it also brings negative consequences.  The flow of information is not an easily manageable stream; it is a flood.  In that flood, there is all manner of foul flotsam that I don’t want to see or touch.

It washes over me anyway.

This also appears at Manzine.