Out of My Skull by James Danckert

Author:James Danckert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press

Sorting Signal from Noise

Klapp would suggest that it is the lack of information that makes monotony boring. Monotonous circumstances by their definition contain little to no new information, and humans, according to this account, have an inherent need to seek new information. This is not sensation seeking in the sense of the adrenalin junkie’s need for thrills but a curiosity driven by the need for discovery. But what if there is too much variety? Here, according to Klapp, we are unable to extract a meaningful signal from the noise. As the ticker tape of news items scrolls across the bottom of the screen, a talking head tells us about a specific story. Insets to the right show changing traffic conditions on the major highways of our city plus weather forecasts at hourly intervals. How are we to make sense of the sheer onslaught of information? Boredom may well be one outcome of the imposing wall of information we encounter every day. As Klapp puts it, boredom “arises when [the] pace gets faster, change lacks meaning, and movement lacks arrival.”3 Things are constantly happening, but we struggle to make sense of them. And it is certainly true that the ease of access to information in our age at least gives the impression that things are changing at an ever-increasing rate.

So at both ends of this information spectrum—too little or too much—we have a crisis of meaning (Chapter 7). With too little information to satisfy and with little to no change from one moment to the next, things become unbearably monotonous. With too much information to wade through we may feel like we’re constantly in motion—from one tweet to the next, from one funny cat video to the next, from one so-called “breaking” news story to the next—without ever pausing to figure out what, if anything, all of this information means to us.

This account of boredom as a function of information overload in a modern age casts the experience in terms of our need to discover and make meaning, and in so doing, express our agency. Not all repetition is bad. Familiarity anchors our understanding. We find a piece of music intriguing when it plays with our expectations—it is at the same time both familiar and surprising. Similarly, not all variety is good. A Schoenberg symphony is chaotic and impenetrable to someone unfamiliar with atonal music. Extreme redundancy and extreme variety both prevent us from getting an intellectual foothold so that we can perceive something new and meaningful. Optimal engagement then depends on finding a balance between repetition and variety—yet another kind of Goldilocks zone. In this context, boredom functions as a signal that mediates the oscillation between redundancy and variety. This fits with our claim that the boredom signal is not itself problematic. It is how we respond to it that leads to positive or negative outcomes. It also suggests that the highly boredom-prone individual lives at the extremes of information processing—either mired in monotony or overwhelmed by novelty—in either case unable to find the “just right” zone.

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