Hedgehog nation

I AM HEREBY declaring the Information Age a complete bust. We may tell ourselves that, thanks to the Internet, cellphones, the 24-hour news cycle and e-mail updates from MoveOn.org, there’s no piece of information that escapes our notice. But I am living proof that this isn’t true. Take last weekend’s immigration rally in downtown L.A., which, as we all know by now, drew crowds of more than half a million. I can’t believe I’m admitting this in print, but as of Saturday morning, I didn’t know about it. I found out when I stepped outside to get the newspaper and ran into my neighbor, who was wearing a white “Unite Now” T-shirt.

“Going to the march?” he asked me.

“What march?” I asked.

He looked at me as if I’d just returned from Paris and mentioned that I didn’t notice the Eiffel Tower.

As ashamed as I was, it turned out that plenty of other people hadn’t gotten the memo either. My sample of the clueless included a lawyer-turned-history professor, an Ivy League-educated writer and, ahem, a news producer. Another friend said she’d heard about the rally but only in the context of warnings about traffic snarls. These are all people who spend much of the day on the Internet, often while listening to news programs on public radio and talking on the phone with friends and associates who don’t exactly live in caves.

Somehow I, like so many others, managed to miss the coverage preceding the event. Was this because I was too busy reading Yahoo news items about Jessica Simpson and obscure Australian journal articles about “Darwinian aesthetics”? Well, actually, yes.

Not to throw around 10-cent aphorisms like “the more you learn, the less you know,” but I daresay the reason some of us miss major news is because there’s just too much news out there. The more information that becomes available, the less informed we are.

I blame this phenomenon on many things -- Wikipedia, Anderson Cooper, holiday newsletters from relatives who share the details of their diverticulitis -- but whatever the source, I suspect the root cause is the over-customization of information. We may pat ourselves on the backs for being discerning consumers of news, but that very discernment can make us kind of stupid. Think of it as intellectual provincialism. Now that we can tailor our information streams by programming our TiVos, signing up for newsgroups and clicking past boring front-page stories in favor of juicier dispatches about real estate, we can top off our data reserves without the bother of actually learning anything new.

If the old-fashioned way of getting news -- three networks, the morning newspaper and (for that rarified but very vocal minority) a daily dose of “All Things Considered” -- was an inch deep and a mile wide, today’s acquisition process is like researching a dissertation. Instead of branching out, we burrow deep. It’s like a peculiar twist on the dichotomy between Isaiah Berlin’s famous concept of the fox, “who knows many things,” and the hedgehog, “who knows one big thing.” Even though we have ample opportunity to know a little (even a lot) about everything a search engine turns up, we tend to sift through all that information to learn more about the stuff we’re already interested in. The result is that we’ve become a nation of hedgehogs.

This isn’t the usual take on modern life. If there’s any notion that culture critics hold dear, it’s the idea that headlines have taken the place of stories and “analysis” is another word for pundits who walk off Sunday morning news shows in a huff. There’s some truth to that, but isn’t it also possible that the overload of information is gradually reprogramming our minds so that we’re actually thinking deeper about a narrower range of topics?

That might explain the look of horror on my neighbor’s face. As it happens, he and his wife are professional labor organizers -- in other words, dedicated hedgehogs when it comes to immigration issues. And even though I’ve often thought of myself as a fox (good dinner party conversationalist, miserable academic), it was only then, standing in my yard in my bathrobe and feeling like the neighborhood numskull, that I realized I’m a hedgehog too.

If he’d asked me about German cinema, I would have knocked his socks off (of course, 500,000 people don’t show up at German film festivals). As it is, I’m still trying to get over my embarrassment. I never thought I’d say this, but maybe it’s time we all got in touch with our inner fox -- at least a little. Hedgehogs may be brainier in the strict sense, but it’s hard to squeeze those prickly spines into a “Unite Now” T-shirt.