Too Much Information?

The entertainment of the Edwardian period was the same as that of the Victorian age, live theatre, sporting events, and fine dining, were the primary social outings for much of the middle class. These events were not marked by an influx of information regarding the world at large. However, during the Edwardian period the emergence of new electronic arts, specifically cinema and radio, provided a new way for the people to receive information about the world and the society they inhabited. After WWI, cinema and radio began to assume part of the traditional role of the newspaper and they provided news to the public in a much more engaging fashion. Newspapers did not, however, lose significant readership at this point, it would take the advent of the internet to show a reduction in the number of subscriptions. The cinema news reels produced during WWII are great examples of British propaganda and forecast the propaganda we see today on many television networks.

One significant aspect of these new technologies is the way in which they have come to affect our lives on a daily basis. By the late 1930’s the television set was available commercially and the obvious increase in viewership and the development of cable television networks made it so that news across the world could reach millions of homes in an instant. This was further increased with the development of the internet in the 1990s, and today we are literally a few seconds away from any piece of news, we hear and see it reported as it happens wherever it happens.

The Edwardians were one of the first groups to experience such a drastic change in media. The leap from print media, and to a lesser degree radio, to the visual medium of the cinema provided a plethora of novel experiences for the modern viewer. What they marvelled at, we take for granted. In our post-modern world the dissemination of news via a visual medium has been taken to the extreme, now we discover news the moment it occurs across the globe from such websites as Youtube or Digg, websites mediated by the viewers themselves. The medium has diversified to include even recorded images from the cameras in our cellphones. When the twin towers fell in New York many of us were watching the newsfeed live in our homes, imagine if that had been the case when the Titanic sank, or when the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Would writers like H.G. Wells or George Orwell have been surprised by the vision of the future we live in today? In this digital age we find the very world at our fingertips, far from the birthplace of such technologies that brought us to this point, but still very much related. The excess of the Edwardian period surrounds us today, however, it is not found in our immediate physical surroundings but online in the billions of ones and zeroes that provide us with the information, information we can access at any time and from virtually anywhere. But how much is too much? Furthermore, how do we discern where the truth lies in such a system?