The Age of the Anecdote

Our age is the age of the anecdote. This statement may at first seem paradoxical. The normal assumption is that the Internet, and mass media in general, has liberated information from dusty old library stacks and put them into the hands of the Everyman, enlightening the people and toppling the ancient, withering hierarchies. This has happened; the problem is that anecdotal information is perhaps the primary thing released into the world.

In the past, anecdotes were common but contained by the sheer bigness of the globe. If Mr. Smith and Mrs. Smith had a spat, Mr. and Mrs. Carpenter might hear, but it is quite unlikely that Mr. and Mrs. Schwarzkopf in Mannheim would’ve heard a thing. Today, not only do Mr. and Mrs. Schwarzkopf hear about the spat, but they also publish it on the Internet, use it to argue that marital discontent is rising, and so, ironically, call for an end to the archaic institution all together. The problem with the anecdotal age is precisely that it allows us to point to single occurrences or series of occurrences and apply them universally. In the past, we had local, and occasionally national, anecdotes to go by, but we lacked a global network of computers to do the logically fallacious arguing for us.

And this fits into the pattern that mass media make possible. With the increase in the volume and dissemination of information comes ease of manipulation. The human tendency to factionalism and discontent is exacerbated by a neatly organized overload of information. In other words, we have so much on our plates that it actually becomes easier to ignore the big things and instead to bicker about the little ones. Health care can be reduced to one woman’s being unable to afford contraception; foreign policy is actually about one Western reporter’s impression of how life seems in a place.

Anecdotes are, of course, useful. And we should always balance experience and logic in our debates about salient issues. But we must also be conscious of how our new technological framework makes possible a new type of ignorance, something of a real dark age. We must recognize what Jacques Ellul said long before our time: “journalistic content is a technical complex expressly intended to adapt man to the machine.” That adaptation may be to the age of the machine, or concurrently, to that of the anecdote.