INFORMATION, PLEASE

by James Lincoln Warren

It’s been a while since I stood on my educational soapbox, so here’s a fine diatribe to start your week off with on the subject.

The other day, a young man of my acquaintance trying to make a name for himself as a producer in the film industry asked me how I handled interviews with actors. I looked at him in surprise, because I have nothing whatsoever to do with actors if I can manage it — although my elder brother Richard was a stage actor for many years. Him I can’t help, because he’s my brother. But usually …

My young friend had made the natural mistake in assuming that because I write and live in Los Angeles, I must be a screenwriter. When I told him that that wasn’t the kind of writing I did, he asked me what I did write. When I told him, he laughed and said, “You know, I should be ashamed to admit it, but I hate to read. It takes too much time and I get bored. I guess I’m part of that post-literate generation you hear about. If given a choice, I’d rather see the movie than read the book.”

“You’re right,” I said. “You should be ashamed.”

I won’t bother the Gentle Reader with how I managed to regain my equanimity, although it did feature a dose of my explaining to my young friend that even movies have to be written. And also read. But enough. There is a constant battle going on among psychologists as to whether temperament and personality are the results of nurture or nature, but there’s one thing I’m absolutely certain of, and that’s that nobody comes out the womb already able to read. It is categorically a learned behavior. And that brings me to education and my soapbox.

We call the age we’re living in “the Age of Information”, but never in life has there been a greater misnomer. We don’t deal with information at all — we deal with streaming data.

The original meaning of the word inform was “to give form to, put into form or shape.”1 By extension, when it came to human beings, to inform a man or woman was to “form, mould, or train the mind, character, etc., especially by imparting learning or instruction.” This use is now quite rare, but from it derived the present definition of “to impart knowledge of some particular fact or occurrence.”

Likewise, the word information didn’t originally really mean mere data. Instead, it meant the “formation or moulding of the mind or character, training, instruction, teaching; communication of instructive knowledge.” Therefore, in the 18th century, a well-bred morally upright and educated man was deemed “a man of information.”

In our touted Age of Information, people don’t even read when they can see the movie. What a paucity of imagination the world now has. It’s like the claim that the current fad of permanently marking your body with tattoos or piercings is somehow a sign of rebellion and individualism. Face it: adhering to any fad is the act of a sheep. Frankly, a more conformist act is difficult to conceive, a more blatant shibboleth not even possible.

But I don’t really mind tattoos, only the claim that they’re a sign of originality. A person’s character has really very little to do with how many tats he has, although one must naturally suspect that vanity plays a larger part than it ought in accordance with the act of turning one’s body into a display. What I really do object to are those proliferating aspects of contemporary culture that encourage ignorance and lock-step conformity, and the best way to do that is to provide easy-to-digest cultural pap instead of education.

And I’m not talking just about formal education, either. Experience is the hardest school of all. I learned ship driving from driving ships — and there are life lessons in driving a many-tonned vessel, from anticipating the effects of tide, wind, and current, to learning that the major consequences of one’s decisions are rarely immediately visible. This, too, is information.

But how many times have you heard somebody say of an event in real life, “Hey, that’s just like in [Fill In Movie Title]”? (Listen, you nitwit, Oscar Wilde was joking when he said that life imitates art. Oh, sorry, you don’t know who Oscar Wilde is.) By reacting this way, people remove their experiences from the messy real world and place it in the tidy formula-mill of Hollywood, where the star turn happens in the first five minutes of action and everybody has a soundtrack to their lives. The Me Movie.

Look, the stuff I write isn’t meant to change anybody’s life and it’s definitely not real. And yes, I follow conventions and even formulas at times: the smartass P.I., the detective disclosing the solution scene, the unexpected plot twist. But one of the things I enjoy about detective fiction is that it engages the mind, that it stimulates some bit of thought — a fair-play puzzle story is a form of brain-teaser, isn’t it? Even a hard-boiled detective story is a travelogue that depends on mentally drawing conclusions. But here’s the bottom line: I wouldn’t write detective fiction if I didn’t read detective fiction.

And the greatest joy in reading is learning.

All right, I’m stepping off the soapbox now. But we have a lot of work to do in weening our society off the mental Pop Tart of post-literacy. The liberal arts are vanishing from our university curricula in favor of vocational programs. (“Hi! I have a bachelor’s degree in the liberal arts! Would you like fries with that?”) Literacy has vanished from our high schools. (According to our own government, the average reading level in the U.S. is that of an 8th grader.) Despite all the access that the internet has given us, the act of information is direly threatened. What’s the point in writing a story, of crafting every sentence, of engaging the reader’s imagination, if the public prefers waiting for the movie that will never be made? Or even if it is, tells a different version?

I don’t know. Maybe it’s quixotic. (That’s a reference to a book.)

1. All definitions courtesy of my Bible, the Oxford English Dictionary. [↩]