An impoverished variety of experience

I Never Understood Our Data-Saturated Life Until a Hurricane Shut It Down

… It is tempting to say that Helene provided us an unplanned hiatus from the "flood of information" that addles the contemporary mind, the torrents of data and noise that overtake the trickles and rivulets of our senses. But this is backward. The problem with our direct sensory experience of the world is that it contains too muchinformation: too much data, too many interpretations, too much meaning. The philosopher Eugene Gendlin once described it as a "myriad richness" that presents us with far more "than our conceptual structures can encompass" — "we feel more than we can think," he wrote, "and we live more than we can feel." It is experience that is the flood, the borderless amnion we have always lived within and cannot escape.

What is degrading about the blitz of digital information into the mind is not its abundance but its meagerness. Its bland volumes insist that mere information can sum to the richness of experience: that words, pictures and videos can fully capture what it is like to endure a hurricane; that our activity on social media is equivalent to the essential human behaviors it simulates; that you can truly know the world through the curated and recycled observations, ideas and messages of other people. Interacting with a network is a variety of experience, of course. But it is one that is impoverished by abstraction, remoteness and endless mediation. On the internet, we even tacitly recognize the pettiness and insufficiency of these virtual sensations: Those most sickened by them are advised to "touch grass." Don't look, but touch. There are mysteries and meanings that live in our contact with the world, and with one another, that do not survive in the traffic of a network.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/11/magazine/hurricane-disaster-information-media-blackout.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare