Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut.

Information, once rare and cherished like caviar, is now plentiful and taken for granted like potatoes. So says media scholar and cyber-pundit David Shenk, whose intriguing and well-written book assesses our culture's unquestioning devotion to information technology. Given faxes, e-mail, news, infotainment, and advertising is it any wonder that we are suffering from what the author terms "data smog" - too much information that confuses rather than enlightens. Some examples:

* In 1971 the average American was targeted by at least 560 daily advertising messages. Twenty years later, that number had risen sixfold, to 3,000 messages per day.

* Paper consumption per capita in the United States tripled from 1940 to 1980 (from 200 to 600 pounds), and tripled again from 1980 to 1990 (to 1,800 pounds).

* The business manager may read one million words per week.

* As of 1990, more than 30,000 telemarketing companies employed 18 million Americans, and generated $400 billion in annual sales.

Shenk tells us that all this data smog crowds out quiet moments, obstructs contemplation, and stresses us out. Whether it's increased attention deficit disorder or aggravated hypertension, stimulus overload is doing many of us in.

The author begins his book by presenting his own infatuation with information technology. But over time he realizes that the real challenge isn't to gain information but to reduce it. For example, in four years of research on this book Shenk electronically accumulated 23,967 pages of text, visited roughly 1,000 Web sites and conducted 481 NEXUS searches which resulted in the downloading of 46.2 megabytes (the equivalent of about 14,000 pages) of text. He had become an information Midas, everything he touched turned into digital data. But this "wealth" was really specious because so much of it was useless to the project and it took too long to make sense of it.

Shenk offers a variety of ways to cope with data smog. They include: watch as little TV as you can, resist upgrading your computer, become more interested in people and get your name off junk mail/phone lists (in the Appendix he tells you how to do this). I may be biased but I would like to suggest an additional way, one that has been available to the public for over sixty years, to cope with information glut, study and apply general semantics.