Pandora’s Inbox

Feb 12, 2013 Shashi Tharoor

An estimated 294 billion e-mails were sent daily in 2010, and the figure continues to increase. But there is an inverse relationship between the difficulty and expense of communication, on one hand, and the quality of what is communicated, on the other.

NEW DELHI – A half-century before the invention of e-mail, T. S. Eliot asked, “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” If he were alive today, contemplating an electronic inbox on a flickering computer, he might well have added, “Where is the information that has been lost in trivia?”

It is one of the paradoxes of our times that inventions meant to make our lives easier inevitably end up slowing us down. When e-mail first entered my life, I was thrilled; instead of letters piling up for months as I struggled to find the time to pen replies, faxes not going through, and telegrams that cost an arm and a leg, I now had a cost-free means of communicating instantaneously and efficiently. I became an avid and diligent e-mailer.

And how I regret it.

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Shashi Tharoor

Writing for PS since 2002
169 Commentaries

Shashi Tharoor, a former UN under-secretary-general and former Indian Minister of State for External Affairs and Minister of State for Human Resource Development, is an MP for the Indian National Congress. He is the author, most recently, of Pride, Prejudice and Punditry: The Essential Shashi Tharoor (Aleph Book Company, 2021).

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Nathan Coppedge Feb 16, 2013

The time has come for information scenario editing, or something similar. We should no longer be obliged to respond to e-mails or the news (many people say the news is too depressing). Instead we should get optional tailored products such as new search engines, new literary forms, new interactive products, etc. based on our information input. We should also offer products ourselves, based on our own creative utility and the products we have found (or bought) before. If it is not an end to the scenario brought on by e-mails at least it syphons the wheat from the chaff, and certainly could be useful for corporations, especially think-tanks. If it limits appreciation of humanity, perhaps it's just part and parcel of the inevitable. And it offers creative opportunities which would go unrealized by e-mail. The key, of course, is efficiency, the point you were making.
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W. Ainvar Feb 15, 2013

Excellent article. Eliot also said “poetry began with a savage beating a drum in a jungle” To me, that savage and that drumming represent the earliest attempt of human beings to communicate, to express meaning. From that very first moment, so Bakhtin, we have been repeating the same-in-other-words, hieroglyphs, symbols, articles, images, letters, e-mails, tuits, messages on facebook etc. Speech is silver but silence is gold: I do have a need to communicate but is my speech better than silence? More often than not, it is not.

I definitely see an information overload around me, not only that but also, as Zsolt says, an overload of artificially generated desires. I find it very difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff, especially because the amount of chaff has rocketed. I do not think technology is going to help me in that respect unless I first learn how to properly use my highly addictive mind.

Have a nice day.
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Procyon Mukherjee Feb 13, 2013

Mr. Tharoor raises a pertinent question on the information over-load and the evidence seems to point contrary to the staggering claims that information is not getting any bit easier to handle and is also getting less useful.

The point is not to stop and jump the ship or complain, but to find solutions to this enduring problem as it would be drawing our attention to the trivia while making us inattentive to the vital and fundamental. In fact some new business models are evolving where this is an area of exploit.
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Zsolt Hermann Feb 12, 2013

The article gives a very good example through the email flood how we are drowning in something that is actually completely useless and unnecessary.
Today in the life of most people, except those unfortunate ones fighting for their daily bread, 99% of the activity is directed to something that is totally fruitless, we could easily do without.
The modern consumer society created bubbles on top of bubbles when most of humanity as a blind flock is chasing artificially generated desires, chasing things we never really needed, never even thought about, which overall makes our lives much worse then it could be., as we are working all days of our lives for nothing, being buried under debt despite working more than ever before.
In truth we are all slaves, in truth we are all connected to the "Matrix".
But we are all afraid, we do not dare to disconnect, we continue the flock mentality and keep following others as we are afraid of letting go, we are afraid of the unknown.
There is only one solution.
Setting up small communities by those who had enough, where people start raising different values, goals, returning to more natural thinking and lifestyle, placing emphasis on the importance and qality of human connections instead of material goods and pleasures.
Such small communities within the larger global communities could soon become the object of envy, as people living in such communities could become free, break out of the "Matrix" and return to a happy human life, and such freedom and happiness immediately would be recognizable to others still remaining in the "Matrix".
Of course the smaller communities would face rejection, jealousy and even attempts of suppression from the larger community as this is the nature of human beings.
But as this global community will continue sinking deeper into crisis as a result of the present unnatural and unsustainable lifestyle and socio-economic system, more and more people will jump off the boat and swim to the small, but growing island of those pioneering the new, natural, global and mutually interdependent approach.
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