Book info

• Title Too Much Information
• Author Dave Gorman
• Year 2014
• Genre Non-fiction

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 (crippling 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 adverts, 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?

Thoughts

Interesting book, this one. You really have to buckle yourself up for a bucket load of cynicism. Spread across your life, it’s probably a healthy amount of questioning the world around you and not just falling for every claim put in your path. Bundled together in a book like this, well, it does read a little grumpy and frustrated with the way the world’s going.

Some things I agreed with, others I wasn’t bothered about. Some I think I already question enough, others I massively disagreed with. (The conveyer belt separator complaint was really annoying. It’s insanely useful for someone who does do more than a basket full of shopping at a time, and usually has their head buried in the trolley trying to pick up the last few bits by the time the person ahead has disappeared. Where’s the room for conversation and ‘oop, those are mine’ there?)

But that’s what’s great about a book like this. It gets you thinking, and thinking skeptically, with a particular focus on media - social and mainstream - as we navigate our way through life.

Rating: 3 / 5