News

Here is a variation on the old “if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, will it make a sound?” question: If the World Health Organization finally declares swine flu to be a global pandemic, as it did last week, but many of us overdosed weeks ago on swine-flu information, not to mention misinformation, will anybody care?

The answer is that many people won't give a rat's ass (or perhaps I should say a pig's hoof) because they are now at a completely different place in their personal information cycle vis-à-vis the swine-flu thing. They've moved on.

Moving on – from major world-threatening events, from big splashy crime stories, from political imbroglios and even from Susan Boyle – has now become a key survival tool in the post-information age.

I say “post,” because “information age” – surely a passé term, anyway – hardly feels like an adequate description of the unprecedented daily – no, hourly – feed of news, views and gossip coming at us through old and new media sources.

The torrent is so relentless, there's even too much information about those new media sources. If I have to read one thing more about how to Twitter, I will scream.

Today the news cycle is nasty, brutish and, above all, short: Blink and you may miss which Canadian politician called which life-threatening medical issue “sexy” and have to sit out the next dinner-party conversation. (Mind you, on the flip side, every single misdeed by a public person lurks forever in Internet archives, ready to rear up and bite a promising career over and over again.)

The most screwy thing is how the speed at which we move on often diminishes our capacity to really feel for others. I was taken aback in March when less than 10 days after the tragic death of actress Natasha Richardson in a skiing accident at Mont Tremblant, a young woman at one social gathering asked almost callously, “Why are we still talking about this? Isn't this over?” (I wanted to respond, “It's not over for me because her death touched me, and it still does.” But the table had already moved on to – what was it? Oh yes: Who Twittered?)

How we absorb, cope with, process and personally curate our information these days is worthy of its own academic discipline. A few years ago, David Levy, a professor at the Information School at the University of Washington, coined the phrase “information environmentalism,” which means we need to at least be conscious of what we're absorbing and ask ourselves whether we really need to know whatever it is that is consuming the airwaves.

Many busy people I know seriously triage information, deciding what they will not even attempt to grasp. I recently drew the line at something called Jon & Kate Plus 8 that seems to be currently commanding too much attention, and I think I am a far better person for it. (And please, don't write in and tell me what it is – I really don't care.) Another strategy might be to delegate some specific information absorption to others: “Hey, can you let me know if I need to worry again about swine flu?”)

In a funny example of how much our information streaming and rate of absorption has changed, I experienced a dislocating moment last month when I heard that Elizabeth Edwards, wife of disgraced and unfaithful former U.S. Democratic leadership candidate John Edwards, had given a soul-baring interview to Oprah about her new book. For days I read about this interview online and even watched an excerpt. But for some frustrating reason – I figured it was my own ineptitude – I could not find the entire interview to download. Finally, I figured out why: It hadn't happened yet! In other words, I had been absorbing first hype and promo, then “news” about the hype and promo, when the actual interview in its entirety was only due to be aired later that week.

It's no wonder then, that in the midst of this relentlessly churning information cycle that people get confused. They either yawn and say, “Swine flu? Why are we still talking about this? Isn't it over?” Or they feel eternally restless, asking themselves and each other in a kind of mass ADD moment: “What's next?”

To which, my heartfelt answer is, I haven't a clue, but I'll let you know as soon as I do. It just might be swine flu.