Armando Iannucci has a new TV program coming out soon so he’s doing the rounds of the broadsheets being interviewed and writing those sorts of articles that people who have new TV shows or books or whatnot write, usually taking some aspect of modern life and taking a contrary position regarding it to make a biting comment on society.

Iannucci’s effort in this circus, That’s Enough Entertainment, Thanks, written for the Daily Telegraph, is not, as it happens, a bad piece. I was expecting some thin-brained expansion of a stand-up routine that I could easily demolish, but annoyingly, and to his credit, there is some good thinking hidden under the laffs here.

That said, he brings up something of a bugbear of mine – the horror of the overflowing iPod to illustrate the problem of choice fatigue.

“Having all music in their pocket, they find it more difficult to be entirely satisfied with the track they’ve chosen to listen to. The urge to flick is greater across multi-channel TV, not necessarily because the programmes are bad, but because logic dictates there has to be something even better somewhere else.”

Now, I understand this. The problem with modern living in an affluent country like our own is that we have too much choice and we don’t know how to process it. But I think there’s something of Plato’s cave going on here.

I’m a little rusty on the specifics but as I remember it Plato (or maybe it was Socrates via Plato) had this metaphor about how people deal with knowledge. Imagine a cave where someone is chained up so he can’t move. All the can see is a blank wall onto which are projected shadow puppets animated by a flickering fire. As far as the chained victim in concerned this is reality because he can see nothing else. Everything about the world can be explained by him in terms of the shadows. Now, say the man is unchained and allowed to walk around the cave. He sees the static models and discovers how the fire animates them. And then he discovers the entrance to the cave and sees the outside world in all it’s infinite glory. As I remember it (and it has been a good decade…) the man gets scared and chains himself back up.

But what bugs me about this is that we’ve been dealing with absurd quantities of choice for quite a while now. It’s only since we’ve been able to accurately quantify it that people lose the ability to cope. My mum recently asked me that common question about the 11,000 mp3s on my computer that would run for 40 days non stop. “When do you find the time to listen to it all?” she exclaimed. I pointed out that thanks to her previous career as a singer and her partner’s previous career as a conductor the mass of vinyl classical records they own was probably equivalent, not to mention the many shelves of sheet music and orchestral scores that line the spare bedroom. Does she look at this and wonder when they’ll find the time to listen to it all? Does she realise that she’ll probably never listen to a decent chunk of it ever again and dispose of it? Of course not. The fact that it’s there and available should she want to is what’s important.

Or to put it another way, you don’t walk into a public library to which you have complete and unfettered access, and exclaim “how will I ever find the time to read all these books!”

I remember way back, circa 1992 or so, when the notion of “information as power” first came to me. I would keep newspaper articles and photocopy bits of information from the reference library about whatever it was I was fascinated by at the time. In retrospect I never actually did anything useful with all this information but I was convinced that in order to survive in this modern age the accumulation of information was vital. As the internet started to come into our imaginations this notion became more widespread. Imagine being able to access all the information in the world in seconds! People will become empowered! It’ll be the dawn of a new age!

The problem is that people aren’t trained to deal with all this stuff. They’ve suddenly been unchained from the cave where everything was black and white and have been thrust into this arena where you have to make critical judgments about everything you experience, and it is everything. It’s no small wonder that many people just stick to a few forums or blogs and effectively ignore this wealth of wonder out there – it’s just too much hard work to apply their critical faculties to all this new stuff. And that’s not to say they’re spoon-fed drones or anything, just that this is a quite different arena.

That said, I don’t think the incessant quantification helps matters. The emphasis on choice implies that the user has to actively chose all the time from a range of options that no-body can deal with. Five thousand songs, 200 online newspapers, fifty millions online radio stations. Given this enormity you’re more likely to stick to your FM radio and newsagent with the occasional trip to a small branch of HMV so you can get on with the more important aspects of being alive.

Seasoned web users figured out long ago that the only way to deal with the enormity of the web is to set it up so you don’t have to be bothered. Either stick to your own niche or let others do the aggregating. Check your feeds and when you’ve read them all then that’s it. Once the internet that you can be bothered with has run out, the other fifty-thousand billion pages might as well not exist. Keep everything in manageable packages the parameters of which you have specified otherwise your brain will explode and you’ll never read anything.

So Iannucci is sort of right. Given the infinite amount of stuff out there it’s pointless to pretend that you can experience it all, but I think it’s wrong to not be bothered and just ignore it all. You just need to figure out the best way to filter it, and that way will be pretty unique to you.

But what really narks me about Iannucci’s piece, the part where he’s gone all glib-stand-up-routine, is that he can be bothered. The reason he never watched the Sorpranos and all the other “must-see” programs he lists is because he’s busy making his own TV and radio shows. Since, by his argument, he’s just adding to to the infinite pile of entertainment, what’s the point? The point is that it’s worth creating this stuff for the same reason it’s worth seeking it out. Communication of ideas, be it entertainment or hardcore academia, is what makes us human.

There’s quite a lot to all this. Probably a book’s worth. Maybe if there’s enough interest I’ll try and expand on bits of it in future posts. Or maybe I won’t bother.