Euro-babble and information overload

Citation

Cannon-Brookes, P. (1999), "Euro-babble and information overload", European Business Review, Vol. 99 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/ebr.1999.05499fab.005

Euro-babble and information overload

Peter Cannon-Brookes

Peter Cannon-Brookes is joint editor of The International Journal of Museum Management and Curatorship, Oxford, UK

Keywords EU, Information Management, Communication, Foreign language, National cultures

In the halcyon days after the end of the Second World War, books could be purchased in London to fill empty shelves at £5 per yard for leatherbound and £3 for cloth, and for the next 20 years or so publication of a book or report of professional significance was a special event and eagerly discussed. Today the amount of reading matter generated has exploded, to the extent that it has to be asked of much of it: Is anyone out there reading it? and if so, who and what? In 1998 the British book publishers alone released some 100,000 new titles, though the phenomenon of books purchased for every purpose bar reading is nothing new. Dr Samuel Johnson appears to have understood the problem (Boswell, Life, 19 April 1773) [Elphinstone] "What, have you not read it through?", [Johnson] "No, Sir, do you read books through?". Subsequently, Lady Holland, in her Memoir (1855) quoted the comment of Sydney Smith (1771-1845) to the effect that "No furniture [is] so charming as books" and that theme was taken up more recently by Anthony Powell for the title of his novel, Books Do Furnish a Room.

At first it was feared that the arrival of electronic media, not least the Internet, would soon render much hard-copy publishing redundant, but the opposite would appear to be the case and the English-speaking community, at least, is buying more books and periodicals than ever before. Vast new bookshops are being opened in London and elsewhere, and the mass marketing of books by Amazon and others through the Internet is, hopefully,, one of the commercial success stories of the new medium. Huge numbers of books, above all in the English language, are being sold and hundreds of new journals and magazines on every conceivable subject are reaching the workplace and news-stands, but are they being read?, or even "looked at"? Indeed, are we witnessing the bubble-like growth of a seductive lifestyle indicator, and can the serried ranks of unread "Christmas books" and discarded magazines be laughed away as a harmless social aberration and tribute to the undoubted effectiveness of marketing hype? The 1960s saw the arrival on the publishing scene of the "coffee-table book" - large in format, expensively produced and not intended to be shelved. Instead, it was intended to take its place in the new style of living-room as a symbol of the artistic tastes and cultural aspirations of its proprietor.

Today the message conveyed by the acquisition and display of books is more subtle, but is it really any different? The huge increase in the volume of unread books is by no means confined to cookery and gardening, and, although it is undoubtedly gratifying commercially to their publishers, are there not significant dangers inherent in such developments when they spread from the living-room into university departments and the very heart of our intellectual and commercial communities? The current decline in editorial standards is sharp, and worse in respect of books than periodicals, and it is actively encouraged by the perception - on the part of even reputable book publishers - that few purchasers of their products, reviewers included, will read their products carefully, let alone critically. Consequently their resources are increasingly focused on presentation and marketing while factual and grammatical infelicities are ignored. "What the eye doth not see the heart doth not grieve over". However, in the production and dissemination of information, the printed book is likely to be both the least and the last of the reading person's concerns, and for many a book is for taking on holiday, like sun cream.

After attending to audio communications - meetings, telephone calls, voicemail, pager messages and answering machines - the contemporary recipient of information then turns to incoming e-mails, internal memorandums, faxes and postal communications as the next most urgent. These alone could keep many an office fully occupied throughout the year without the production of any meaningful end product, though justifying thereby its continued existence. In fact, within the developed world, this is rarely the case, even in Brussels, and the constant drive towards lower staffing levels aggravates the information overload situation for the survivors. Notwithstanding ingenious technological advances and filtering devices, a human being can only read a finite amount during a working day and many business persons are desperately worried about the growing problems of information overload within their organisations and the attendant risk of really important information being swamped by the irrelevant or mischievous. If your computer or fax machine has the electronic memory facilities which allow you to send out virtually unlimited numbers of copies of documents to predetermined recipients at effectively no extra cost to the sender, the temptation is to avail yourself of the facility and "keep everyone informed", not least of your own important position within the organisation as a provider of information.

Unsolicited advertising (junk mail and SPAM) is only part of the problem, and today few self-respecting organisations in the developed world, keen to maintain or improve their images, raise money or influence opinion formers, do not send out free newsletters or magazines on a regular basis. Why, even the quarterly utilities bills are now accompanied by them and the consumer ignores the information carefully buried within them at his peril. Consequently coping with the daily deluge of written communications by post, fax and e-mail, on top of the telephone calls, voicemail, etc., even when limited to a single language, presents severe logistical problems before any attempt can be made to cope with the newsletters, periodicals, reports and books also reaching the workplace.

Indeed, to be seen reading a book at the workplace - as against just checking a reference within one - risks being misinterpreted as evidence of either under-employment or lack of application to the immediate business in hand.

Information overload in the Western workplace has been severely aggravated by developments within the academic and research communities which in response to demands from funding bodies for visible "improved productivity", require from academics and other researchers a greatly increased output of books and articles if their professional futures, individual and institutional, are to be assured. In the field of science and technology this can mean virtually the same research material being differently packaged for as many specialist journals and volumes of conference papers as possible, as well as for dozens of progress reports and reviews of the "current" state of research in a particular field. On occasion there is good reason to question the motivation of certain technical publishing programmes when the intention would appear to be to swamp commercially inconvenient research results, vide reports sponsored by the tobacco industry and GM foods. The "voice crying in the wilderness" can be very isolated and the results being published tend to be labelled as maverick or "controversial". In truth the motivation for the various processes of publication has not often had much to do with a real need to impart genuinely objective information, but at least in respect of the scholarly journals the reliability of the contents continues to be safeguarded by the processes of peer review. On the other hand, the rapid expansion of the Internet is accompanied by growing concern about the reliability of much of the "information" made available on it and the freedom with which it can be manipulated. It is not without reason that the Internet is accused of being stuffed with huge quantities of data, a limited amount of information, and very little knowledge, but such semantic niceties are virtually ignored by most of its users.

For historical reasons, as well as the impact of specific linguistic and cultural factors, the bulk of the data/information to be retrieved currently from the Internet is made available in one of the considerable number of variant forms of the English language. The significant differences in meaning evident between, for example, many words and expressions in English English as against the same when expressed in American English, are greater than is generally recognised, and growing, while the problems of partial understanding and misunderstanding which stem from the different usages tend to be minimised or ignored, not least by those using "English" as a convenient second language. Some variations in spellings immediately alert the reader to which form of the English language is being used in the document being read, but reckless use of computer spell-checkers can land the reader in mid-Atlantic or conceal the truth that although the spelling may be that of American English, the usage is English English. Recently, a no less august body than The Getty Conservation Institute included in a volume of extracts taken from a range of published sources extended quotations from Ruskin transformed into American English! This problem is serious and a multinational language developing freely without a strictly limited number of clearly defined usages is in danger of losing its usefulness as an international means of communication. These problems are very real for the diplomatic community which has, during the second half of this century, progressively abandoned the tightly controlled French language in favour of "English" as the preferred diplomatic lingua franca.

All this is of fundamental importance for the Tower of Babel based in Brussels and the increasingly unacceptable cost of undertaking all the operations of the European Union in all of its national languages, let alone those of its existing minorities and of the candidate countries of Central and Eastern Europe, when the number and complexity of the documents continue to grow inexorably. Furthermore, concepts can rarely be divorced successfully from the cultural environments in which they have been evolved and which are represented by the languages in which they are expressed. Consequently, one form of words is rarely exactly equivalent to another in a second language, in both meaning and value. Consequently a seemingly straightforward document originally drafted in one language inevitably loses much in translation, or is subtly distorted to meet the different cultural values and aspirations embodied in a second. "Send three and fourpence, we are going to a dance" may be ludicrously extreme but it is human. These practical difficulties are bad enough when only a few languages are involved, but within the context of the European Union and the deeply-rooted historic rivalries of its constituent parts, they have the potential to tear apart the fragile structure of mutual trust.

Within the central administrative structure of the European Union, with its cadre of multi-lingual public servants dedicated to making the Tower of Babel work, such a costly system can be made to perform successfully, but in the context of the cut-and-thrust of genuine political debate in a polyglot European Parliament which is more than a mere talking shop, the realities of the situation are very different. After all the old empires of post-Medieval Europe, from the Habsburgs and Ottomans to Napoleon and the Russian Tsars, were in large measure held together by single dominant languages employed for their administration and the exercise of central authority. Whereas the allocation of potentially unlimited funds to make the administration of an expanding centralised polyglot state both acceptable to those governed and fully accountable is theoretically possible, in the real world huge polyglot institutions are obliged voluntarily to limit themselves to one or two working languages if the democratic process is not to atrophy under the impact of a snowstorm of administrative delays, garbled information, partial truths, misunderstandings, etc. The European experience of polyglot multi-racial states set up with scant regard for the histories of their component parts continues today with the travails of the former Yugoslavia, and they are a constant reminder of the perils of according too little importance to national cultural differences.

Perhaps perversely, the European Union would happily adopt a single variant of English (probably American English) as its working language, but only if the UK were to cease to be a member state and Anglo-Saxon ways of thinking were thereby relegated to the sidelines, but in reality the huge cost of simultaneous translation of all meetings, and the provision of documents in all languages, must for powerful reasons of political expediency be maintained, while the viability of a truly democratic European Parliament under such a regime is quietly ignored. In the meantime, the inexorable growth of Euro-babble is to be viewed not with amused tolerance but with a clear understanding of the disruptive forces lurking within it, forces which are liable to be concealed by information overload until it is too late.