Are we just shark bait in a sea of information?

We receive an abundance of information daily from computers, television, radio, movies, books, and magazines, but how much of it is really absorbed? But perhaps it we're more picky about the date we digest, we'll be better nourished by it.

Dear Diary,

After more than 24 years on this deserted island, with only each other and a Bible for company, Friday and I were visited last month by two UPS drivers who informed us that as the last two persons on the planet to be connected to the information highway, we had won a free media center from TimeWarner-CNN. Before we could say anything, Tad and Biff had transformed our tree house into a temple of high tech gadgetry including: a multimedia desktop computer (complete with fax modem and Internet access); a 500-channel, 72-inch-digital color TV and VCR;a fully programmable satellite dish, and a handful of video cameras, cellular phones, and pagers.

As a bonus, they also threw in a selection of the 400 most popular video cassettes of all time, including the entire "Rocky" (I to MXCVI), "Batman," and "Die Hard" collections and free samples of 100 magazines and catalogs, out of which fell countless little advertisements smelling of pungent flowers and sea breezes. "You'll never be lonely again," our would-be rescuers cried as they rode into the sunset aboard their dingy. Friday and I abandoned our island a week later, headed for the only Tibetan monastery without a home page on the World Wide Web.

Robinson Crusoe XXV

This little daydream was the result of a conversation I had last week with a young man who was headed off to Guatemala for half a year. Taking advantage of this six-month respite from television, fax machines, and cell phones, he was planning to cart along a box of good books to read. Listening to his description of the proposed trip and the assembled library of trade paperbacks, I felt a definite surge of envy, and driving home that night I found myself fantasizing about the pleasures of a modern-day Crusoe working his way through a trunk full of leather-bound volumes that had washed up on the shore of his island retreat.

The problem for most of us, of course, isn't that we lack for good books or stories. Just the opposite. Unlike the lonely Crusoe, we live amid an embarrassment of literary (and not so literary) riches, an information and publishing glut that threatens to swamp us with its rising tide. In "Perchance to Dream," Jonathan Franzen's recent piece in Harper's about writing fiction in a video age, the novelist notes that Americans bought a record 2.19 billion books in 1995.

Add to that the exploding market of specialty magazines and catalogs, with dozens of glossies for every niche market from archeology to skate boarding, throw in the hurricane of information sweeping into our homes, offices, and cars through cable, satellites, radio, computers, cell phones, and pagers, and you begin to see why "The News Wars," the October 21, 1996 cover story in Time, argues that we are drowning in a flood of data and stories. Indeed, one recent report suggests that each of us is exposed to approximately 1,600 commercial messages a day! Talk about overload.

Since none of us has the time or solitude to digest this much information, most of us are accumulating huge reading deficits. Indeed, if my experience is anything close to normal, nightstands, bathrooms, coffee tables, and book shelves all over America are littered with books and magazine articles we've bought but never read. And each year this reading deficit gets larger and larger, as more of the books we bought in hardback move onto the remainders table or come out in paperback, and more and more of the magazine and newspapers pieces we've put by our beds curl up and go dusty, all without our having finished them. Perhaps, we tell ourselves, we'll catch the movie or rent the video.

But the truth is, we're even leaving a lot of our viewing undone. With remote control in hand, we surf up and down the channels, catching bits and pieces of programs but less frequently watching an entire show from start to finish. And we increasingly check out more films from the local video store than we can possibly watch in the allotted time, and often return them late or unwatched.

The danger here isn't that we'll die with too many books or articles unfinished, but that these burgeoning stacks of unread papers and books are a sign of the increasing superficiality, and disconnectedness of our conversations, or worse, an indication that we may also be losing the solitude needed to develop a rich sense of ourselves. As Sven Birkerts argues in The Gutenberg Elegies (Fawcett Columbine, 1994), the explosion of information in this electronic age has forced us to read more and more horizontally, scanning, skimming, and browsing instead of studying and reflecting. With so much to read and so little time to process and digest what we are reading, we may be losing touch with what Birkerts calls "deep time," those sacramental moments of wonder, reflection, and reverie that open our hearts and minds to the transcendent.

I'm not suggesting that people who don't read great works of literature or wrestle with difficult and thought-provoking essays aren't good, holy, or moral, or even that they lack real depth. That would be ridiculous. People can gain access to wonder and reverie and the transcendent in a wide variety of ways. through art and music, through long walks in the park or forest, and - of course - through prayer and meditation. Still, it does seem to me that the current information glut, by barraging us with more data and stories than we could ever hope to "understand," is creating an attention-deficit syndrome keeping us as harried as Alice's overly busy rabbit, and impeding us from thinking long and hard about anything. We are in danger of losing touch with ourselves.

And because there are far too many stories competing for our shrinking attention spans, modern storytellers, like carnival barkers, have pumped up the volume, sweetened the package, and shortened the message. Indeed, as Benjamin Barber points out in Jihad vs. McWorld (Times Books, 1995), our most successful storytellers have simply given up on the written word and moved to the moving (and sometimes screaming) picture. "Sound and pictures are how what passes for knowledge gets communicated to most people around the globe." Why? Because as Franzen notes, "when you hold a book in your hand, nothing will happen unless you work to make it happen."

Whether it's a new Steven Spielberg film, a political advertisement, or the evening news, our stories are getting shorter, splashier, sexier, and more violent. I sometimes think we are gradually progressing toward a moment when all our stories will resemble nothing so much as those cutesy coffee and mayonnaise commercials with their ongoing "plot" lines - fast, flashy little sound bites of soap opera that don't ask us to do anything except consume.

And what's the result of all this predigested, oversweetened, and salacious entertainment? Barber thinks we are being made over in the image and likeness of perfect consumers, not just of information but of everything else the modern storytellers are selling. According to him, the "videology" behind Hollywood and the infotainment industry is geared "to sell advertising and to keep viewers glued to their sofas."

As a result, our stories are being reworked to improve their value to advertisers, who don't feel that disturbing or controversial programs put us in a mood to consume. And, whether it's a newspaper column or a movie of the week, the very definition of a good story now seems to mean something that will entice us to make a purchase. All the better if, like a Disney tale, there are ready-made tie-in products available at the local burger stand or video store.

Reading literature, you see, doesn't do anything to make us more rapacious consumers. In fact, it may lead to all sorts of notions that would impede or moderate our patterns of consumption. After all, with a good novel we could spend dozens of hours in a place where there are no commercials. Even worse, literature confronts us with issues that can't be solved by a trip to the mall, and with problems that often can't be solved at all, but must simply be faced with grace, courage, and compassion. No wonder serious literature has so little market value.

Still, one of the things that amazes me the most about the information age is how so many of the stories flooding our lives are the same, how little variety there is amid this glut of storytelling, and how many TV shows, blockbuster films, novels, and even local and national news shows and magazines are clones of one another. But maybe that's because the recent rash of mergers in the infotainment sector has left us with fewer storytellers, and because the small cluster of media conglomerates that are producing and delivering most of our contemporary stories are only interested in selling us products that they can unload by the gross.

In the worldwide markets of Disney/ABC and timeWarner/CNN no story is any good unless you can sell it to half the planet. As a result we get more stories that have been "imagineered" according to tried and true blockbuster recipes and formulas.

In The Media Monopoly (Beacon Press, 1982) Ben Bagdikian reports that fewer than 20 conglomerates currently own most of the major media in America and around the world and that vertical and horizontal integration achieved through recent mergers and acquisitions has allowed these media giants to penetrate and corner a variety of international markets and gain control of all sorts of media, scooping up television and radio stations and networks, cable and satellite systems, as well as production and syndication companies, not to mention numerous book publishers and magazine and newspaper chains.

So, although there are currently about 35,000 book publishers in America, most of the industry's revenues now go to just five of them, while the majority of magazine sales, which only 15 years ago was parceled out among the 20 largest companies, is now divided between two major players. And in spite of the fact that there are 11,000 cable systems in the United States, seven companies already have most of the 60 million subscribers.

The picture is even more striking when we get to films and television. At present a small group of major studios produce the overwhelming majority of America's films and TV programs. They not only control what most of us see at the local octiplex and rent at the neighborhood video outlet, but also what comes into the majority of theaters and plays on most of the TV sets around the globe.

Major American movie studios like Disney, TimeWarner, Paramount, MCA, and Fox dominate the global market in films and television programming. Indeed, they have better than 85 percent of the European market. And in most national markets around the globe better than 86 percent of the top grossing films are American made.

In "Resisting the Colonels of Disney," an interview in New Progressive Quarterly with the Greek filmmaker Costa-Garvas, the director of such films as "Z" and "State of Siege," warns that the cultural hegemony of American films is turning the national film industries of Europe and the rest of the planet into endangered species. And in place of all these silenced voices we are faced with a steady diet of increasingly light and technically polished films and television shows, and more and more stories with thin story lines and heavy corporate backing.

In Plato's The Republic Socrates argues that "we must first control the storytellers," and while that probably strikes our modern ears as dangerously close to censorship, we probably would do well to attend to - and speak back to - our current batch of corporate storytellers, lest they take control of us.

It is probably not possible or useful for us to try to turn off the information faucet, or to retreat to a desert island, Tibetan monastery, or Amish farm, but it does strike me as very reasonable to be intentional and critical consumers of the stories flooding our homes. To that end, let me offer a couple of suggestions.

First, we need to be intentional about the stories we read, watch, or listen to. I don't mean that we should only seek out stories that are disturbing, difficult, or challenging, or that we should abstain from tales that are light, silly, or entertaining. We should make sure that our diet of stories is rich and varied, that we occasionally make contact with something that soothes and something that disturbs, that we are not consuming the same four or five mass-produced stories over and over again.

One way to do that would be to try out authors who aren't on the bestseller list, reading some local or regional writers, or picking up a foreign video from the local video store.

Second, we need to be able to create some space for solitude in our lives so that we have a vantage point from which to evaluate the stories we are being told (or pitched).

We need to be able to carve out some quiet place where we can tend and water the garden of our soul. Perhaps that will mean an evening or two a week without the TV, a long quiet walk, a visit to our parish church, or rising early to have some quiet time at the start of our day. And finally, let me suggest that we might seek to immerse ourselves in the stories of scripture, developing a regular habit of reading the Bible. These are, after all, the narratives that have shaped, informed, and sustained the Christian community for two millennia.

They are also the stories that mediate God's presence to us in a special way. And they are, in the end, the stories that sustained Defoe's Robinson Crusoe for 28 years on a desert island. We could do worse.