Gorman - Too much information: ... or can everyone just shut up for a moment, some of us are trying to think

CONTENTS

Nowadays, the world is full of people trying to tell us things. So much so that we have taught our brains not to pay much attention. After all, click the mouse, tap the screen, flick the channel and its on to the next thing. But Dave Gorman thinks its time to have a closer look, to find out how much nonsense we tacitly accept.

Suspicious adverts, baffling newspaper headlines, fake Twitter, endless cat videos, insane TV shows where the presenters ask the same questions over and over...

Can we even hear ourselves think over the rising din? Or is there just too much information?

Dave Gorman is an award-winning comedian, storyteller and writer. He has numerous TV writing credits and was part of the double BAFTA-winning team behind The Mrs Merton Show. His live shows have won many awards and he is the only performer to twice win the Jury Prize for Best One Person Show at the prestigious HBO US Comedy Arts Festival. He was the host of Genius, which ran for three series on Radio 4 and then two series on BBC2. He has appeared in numerous other TV shows, including Absolutely Fabulous, The Frank Skinner Show, Late Show with David Letterman, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. His documentary film, America Unchained, won the Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature at the Austin Film Festival. His 2013 TV show, Modern Life Is Goodish, made for UKTVs Dave channel, saw him dissecting the foibles of modern life in six hour-long comic performances. It quickly established itself as the channels most successful original programme that year and a further sixteen episodes have been commissioned for broadcast in 2014 and 2015. Hell probably be stealing bits of this book for some of them. His ambition is to one day become a team captain on Call My Bluff.

www.davegorman.com

Are You Dave Gorman?

Dave Gormans Googlewhack Adventure

America Unchained

Dave Gorman vs. The Rest of the World

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Published in 2014 by Ebury Press, an imprint of Ebury Publishing
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Copyright Dave Gorman 2014

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For Steve.
He was a damn fine squirrel.

Huge thanks to Jake Lingwood, Liz Marvin, Susan Pegg and everyone at Ebury, especially the citizens of the Peoples Republic of Mondeo. Thanks to Rob Aslett, Cat Gray, Dan Lloyd and all at Avalon, too. Thanks to Duncan Soar for the photos and to David Eldridge at Two Associates for knowing what to do with them.

Martin A. Brooks and Orlando Scott-Cowley were incredibly generous with their time and their wisdom Im very grateful to them both. But my biggest thanks must go to my wife, Beth, whose boundless support, understanding and constancy mean the world to me.

Where appropriate, Ive sprinkled a few internet links around in the footnotes. Ive tried to generate short codes with obvious derivations in order to make them memorable should anyone want to re-type them into their browser. But do bear in mind that they are links to pages I do not control and so I cant offer any guarantee that the pages in question will exist for all time. If a newspaper website edits or removes a page or a YouTube video is taken down for some reason well, thats the nature of the internet. Its beyond my control. But please trust me they were there!

There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant

Ralph Waldo Emerson

INFORMATION IS ADDICTIVE . It is everywhere and yet I cannot get enough. I must suckle on the teat of the world wide web. I get twitchy if it is withheld.

They say men cant multitask but I can multi-procrastinate. Its damaging my ability to uni-task.

As I type this I am sitting at my desk in the tiny pit of a room I laughingly call my office. Im trying to focus on the Word document where these words are slowly emerging but the largely blank expanse of bright white pixels is struggling to hold my attention because poking out from behind it like a crowd of gurning loons thats gathered behind a local news reporter on an outside broadcast are various windows of distraction.

Im logged on to a football club website because there are rumours of an imminent transfer and I dont want to miss an announcement. A second window is logged on to the BBC news page. Facebook occupies a third.

I can check for new emails in a snap and Im also monitoring Twitter on an application called TweetDeck an onscreen dashboard of various columns that constantly update as activity occurs. Which it does often. Every few seconds in fact. TweetDeck looks like a stock traders computer screen when the markets are on fire. Buy whimsy. Sell rage.

No matter how urgent the demands of my Word document, I know that behind it there is always something new I can look at. Something stimulating. New news. New newness. Let me suckle at that teat. I mean, I could leave it until later but then Ill miss something and I cant risk missing something. I must see everything. Ten-minute-old news? Not for me. I dont want stale news. I want fresh news. And fresh cat videos too for that matter.

*

Heres a bit of 1990s trivia for you: Some of the people born in the 1990s are now adults.

I find it hard to believe myself but Ive checked it with a calculator and theres no getting away from it. Its a fact. And itll be even factier tomorrow.

If youre one of them then this world is pretty much all youve known. This world of constant connection this incessant swarm of data is the world you were born into.

I am not one of them. I am an old man. I am a dinosaur. I grew up in a simpler age.