I saw this tag line in the Wall Street Journal, advertising itself. It said:
What do I need to know Today?
This was of course followed by the Wall Street Journal logo, but I found it very interesting what was communicated here.
This statement while short communicates several things:
1. Information is changing daily.
2. You need to know that information immediately.
3. The Wall Street Journal can keep you informed daily of what has changed since yesterday.
It is a simple reality that information is changing constantly. It is always growing and evolving and seems to never cease. There is simply too much information in the world for any one person to know all of it. Certain information is very important to a large majority of people and as such they desire to know it, but they do not want to know information that does not pertain to their lives. They only want to know what they need to know.
This is an attitude that is made clear by this tag line and is quite prevalent in other areas and systems as well. It shows a deep seated minimalist attitude that Americans have towards information, and an ignorance that says, "If I don't need to know it, I don't want to know it."
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Yes. We are familiar with the expression "need to know." What intrigues me is the idea that a third party such as the Wall Street journal should be allowed to arbitrate what we need to know. There is a passivity implied here: what shall we be told we need to know? In some ways our exposure to the filtering and packaging of media and data encourages us to be less involved in our own thinking and awareness. Do the "news stories" prefabricate experience that we might otherwise have constructed into our own stories and so preclude our doing so?
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