Information Glut and Bureaucracy

One of the basic human problems we all face, but seldom name as such or even recognize, is managing the information that is available to us. We struggle to recognize this or name it as a problem because in healthy societies much of the sorting is handled imperceptibly by the various institutions that make up the society. Indeed, managing and sorting information is one of the chief tasks of our institutions.

Think about families: A large part of parenting is managing the flow of information in your household. Sometimes this is relatively immediate and practical in nature—when you're teaching your daughter to ride her bike, you're also trying to help her learn what to attend to and what to ignore as she's riding. More seriously, parents also have to decide when and how to introduce other forms of information to their children. (I now have conversations with our older kids about certain political events. I don’t have those conversations with my four-year-old. That’s information that you grow into. There are other types of “information” that you simply never need to encounter—pornographic material is the obvious example here.)

Here is the great media critic Neil Postman on this problem:

Social institutions of all kinds function as control mechanisms. This is important to say, because most writers on the subject of social institutions (especially sociologists) do not grasp the idea that any decline in the force of institutions makes people vulnerable to information chaos. To say that life is destabilized by weakened institutions is merely to say that information loses its use and therefore becomes a source of confusion rather than coherence.

Social institutions sometimes do their work simply by denying people access to information, but principally by directing how much weight and, therefore, value one must give to information. Social institutions are concerned with the meaning of information and can be quite rigorous in enforcing standards of admission.

But, of course, there is no guarantee that our institutions will actually be successful in this task. So what happens when these institutions break down?

The relationship between information and the mechanisms for its control is fairly simple to describe: Technology increases the available supply of information. As the supply is increased, control mechanisms are strained. Additional control mechanisms are needed to cope with new information. When additional control mechanisms are themselves technical, they in turn further increase the supply of information. When the supply of information is no longer controllable, a general breakdown in psychic tranquility and social purpose occurs. Without defenses, people have no way of finding meaning in their experiences, lose their capacity to remember, and have difficulty imagining reasonable futures.

An illustration of this: I work in media, so I’m in regular communication with many people. That said, I live in Lincoln, NE so of the people relevant to my work that I communicate with regularly, only one is local. All the others I communicate with via tools like Signal, Discord, Slack, SMS, email, etc. All of this communication creates a glut of information (in the form of notifications) which can make it hard to do my work.

So my solution to this has been two-fold: On my computer when I especially need to focus and am having difficulty doing so, I have an app called Freedom that I use to disable access to distracting software. Meanwhile, on my phone I have turned off notifications for every app except my phone and text messaging app. I also will often keep my phone in do not disturb mode, so that the only people whose messages or calls get through are my parents, my wife, and our publisher at Mere O. So this is how I manage the information glut that simply occurs in my life as a result of ordinary daily work.

But note: Managing the glut of information requires… more information. I need to be aware of the Freedom app and know how to use it. I also need to know how to turn off notifications on my phone, set up do not disturb, set up exceptions so that people who might genuinely need to reach me in an emergency actually can, and so on.

This is what Postman is talking about: The simple act of trying to take control of my information intake requires additional information intake. Small wonder we’re all tired.

Now back to Postman:

One way of defining Technopoly, then, is to say it is what happens to society when the defenses against information glut have broken down. It is what happens when institutional life becomes inadequate to cope with too much information. It is what happens when a culture, overcome by information generated by technology, tries to employ technology itself as a means of providing clear direction and humane purpose. The effort is mostly doomed to failure. Though it is sometimes possible to use a disease as a cure for itself, this occurs only when we are fully aware of the processes by which disease is normally held in check.

Later he continues:

In principle a bureaucracy is simply a coordinated series of techniques for reducing the amount of information that requires processing… The invention of the standardized form—a staple of bureaucracy—allows for the “destruction” of every nuance and detail of a situation. By requiring us to check boxes and fill in blanks the standardized form admits only a limited range of formal, objective, and impersonal information, which in some cases is precisely what is needed to solve a particular problem. Bureaucracy is, as Max Weber described it, an attempt to rationalize the flow of information, to make its use efficient to the high degree by eliminating information that diverts attention from the problem at hand… Bureaucracy ignores all information and ideas that do not contribute to efficiency.

Bureaucracy is not in principle a social institution; nor are all institutions that reduce information by excluding some kinds or sources necessarily bureaucracies. Schools may exclude dianetics and astrology; courts exclude hearsay evidence. They do so for substantive reasons having to do with the theories on which these institutions are based. But bureacracy has no intellectual, political, or moral theory—except for its implicit assumption that efficiency is the principal aim of all social institutions and that other goals are essentially less worthy, if not irrelevant. That is why John Stuart Mill thought bureaucracy a “tyranny” and C. S. Lewis identified it with Hell.

The transformation Postman describes looks something like this:

• Humans have always needed ways to manage and sort information, helping them know what needs to be retained, what needs to be acted on, and what can safely be ignored.
• Traditionally, households, legal systems, political systems, schools, media, and other comparable institutions helped people do this effectively, such that individuals did not have a significant number of specific tasks they had to do privately to manage information; the problem was largely addressed by healthy institutions.
• As information technology has grown and become more complex, the amount of information generated has overwhelmed the defenses provided by traditional institutions, causing institutional breakdown and personal fatigue.
• The solution to this problem has been, essentially, to standardize the formatting of information, such that it can be easily summarized through forms, paperwork, and other bureaucratic methods.
• The cost of this has been the loss of personal forms of knowledge as well as softer forms of shared information, such as customs, local traditions, mores, and so on since all of these things are difficult to quantify in ways that computers and bureaucracies can manage. This can perhaps be seen most clearly in the increasingly standardized and mechanized practices common in both American education and American medicine, two fields that traditionally relied upon heavily contextualized, personalized forms of information shared between small groups, sometimes as few as two individuals, but in which information has now been standardized to make it legible to bureaucracies.

This is the environment in which we now live—in which we attempt to form families, educate children, care for the vulnerable, and shepherd and guide Christian believers through a life of faithful discipleship. But because of these changes the ways in which we imagine and understand all of these tasks have been transformed, becoming far less personal and contextual and veering ever more to the impersonal, standardized forms of bureaucratic life.