In sum, to really try to be informed and liter-ate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help.

You’d simply drown. We all would. It’s amazing to me that no one much talks about this—about the fact that whatever our founders and framers thought of as a literate, informed citizenry can no longer exist, at least not without a whole new modern degree of subcontracting and dependence packed into what we mean by ‘informed.

Here is an overt premise. There is just no way that 2004’s reelection could have taken place—not to mention extraordinary rendi-tions, legalized torture, FISA-flouting, or the 6

I know that many of these virtues have to do with the ways in which the pieces handle and respond to the tsunami of available fact, context, and per-spective that constitutes Total Noise. This claim might itself look slippery, because of course any published essay is a burst of infor-mation and context that is by definition part of 2007’s overall r... See more

Fiction’s abyss is si-lence, nada. Whereas nonfiction’s abyss is To-tal Noise, the seething static of every particu-lar thing and experience, and one’s total free-dom of infinite choice about what to choose to attend to and represent and connect, and how, and why, etc.

a rate of con-sumption which tends to level everything out into an undifferentiated mass of high-quality description and trenchant reflection that be-comes both numbing and euphoric, a kind of Total Noise that’s also the sound of our U.S. culture right now, a culture and volume of info 1