Editor’s note: Stephen R. Elson is president and CEO of Pine Company, a Los Angeles information processing and data management firm.

"The faster things change, the more information we need to deal with it." (Alvin Toffler, author of The Adaptive Corporation, The Third Wave and Future Shock.)

As a nation, we’ve shown ourselves to be world masters at generating information. Pack more stats, more facts, more bytes into every minute: this is the course to which much of American business has committed itself. Our entire society may, in fact, be founded on the American standard of information. As Thomas Jefferson put it: "The informed citizen is the cornerstone of democracy."

Information can thrill us, motivate us, and change us. It can be as valuable as gold. Right now, however, we are at war with information. The language of combat shows up again and again in terms such as information explosion, information sickness, data smog, and information fallout.

Here are some - but indeed not all - the signs of information fallout:

1. Despite all the information at your command you seem to know more and more about less and less. In his superb article in Technology Review, ("Data Smog: Surviving the Info Glut") David Shenk quotes pollster Andrew Kohut as saying that data-crowded people "throw their hands up and say, ‘Well, I’m going to focus on this very narrow part of the world.’" Shenk says the Internet promotes this trend, and further "This response is one reason for the troubling level of social polarization plaguing the United States. We face a paradoxical spiral in which the more information we come upon, the more we narrow our focus and retreat into different spheres of knowledge. We are, as writer Earl Shorris says, ‘A nation of lonely molecules.’"

2. Your information has become self-generating and you can’t stop it. Too much unfiltered information is a brain-freeze. It becomes gobbledygook. The inevitable mental response is decision avoidance.

3. You’ve invested in a new workstation with a built-in treadmill -- and you’re working overtime to pay for it. We’ve learned to say no to drugs and limit our intake of junk food but we haven’t learned to say no to information.

4. Your attention span is getting shorter. I repeat, your attention span is getting shorter.

5. You’ve stopped long-range thinking. So much information is available on any given topic that energy can be wasted on solving the smaller stuff, so that we never get a chance to raise our eyes and look into the distance, or out the window.

6. You’ve made mistakes based on contaminated data. The partner of this symptom is loss of faith in gut instincts.

7. In order to keep up, your life consists of the immediate past and the immediate future -- you have no time for the present moment.

Just how widespread is the problem? In his book of essays, Burning Down The House, educator Charles Baxter says this about our dilemma:

"In postmodernism, speed and information, combined through data processing, have moved into cyberspace. It is no wonder that the metaphor of the superhighway has stuck and has become an instant international cliché. But when speed is made to be the defining feature of action, violence is usually not far away, violence defined here as the loss of control under conditions of great velocity. . . .Our fascination with violence is equal to our fascination with data processing: they are two coins in the same pocket."

Baxter goes on to equate the potential danger and violence of speed with the necessity of coping with information. He points up the anxiety and tension computer workers frequently display, and believes that their very stillness enhances the perceived speed by which information travels. Yes, stillness is very much our modern posture, whether in front of computer terminal, movie screen or windshield.

The challenge now is not to produce more data faster -- although we will -- but to make more intelligent and productive use of information through new and improved processing, linking, visualization and management techniques.

Decisions, decisions

In a 1996 article in The Humanist, Richard R. Nethe coined the term "data tsunami." Nethe, for 30 years an advisory quality engineer specializing in data analysis for IBM, states "It’s not . . . surprising that so many of our decisions no longer work in the modern environment that we have created . . . that so many of our decisions, even when made on reliable data, turn out to be wrong. We are simply not designed to make decisions that take into consideration the long-range effect, nor are we equipped to handle a multitude of factors simultaneously. . . . Speed and volume are now favored over integrity and depth."

Yet, although the sociosocietal effects of overabundant information look messy, we had the intelligence to create the Information Age in the first place and we have the intelligence to contain and direct it, if we so desire. If we turn our finest and most creative thinkers loose to solve the next challenge of the information age we can discover how to make information our servant, not our master.

Here are six ideas you can start with to begin clearing up information fallout. Of course, the ideal solution is customized solutions to specific problems, but this is a start.

1. Take regular information breaks. Look at all your information sources - cell phone, fax, PC, television, newspaper, Internet, e-mail - and assess what’s essential and what is superfluous. If you’re getting the same information over and over, turn something off.

2. Get a fresh perspective. Call in the experts. There are companies whose entire reason for being is to domesticate the information monster. Let them do their job and make it easier and more productive for you to do yours.

3. Ask yourself not, "What’s next?" but "What’s right?" Are you contributing the problem or to the solution? Be honest.

4. Learn what others are doing successfully to reduce "the data tsunami." Learn how to stop receiving unwanted e-mail, get off junk mail lists, or as David Shenk does, put your television in the closet except for preselected viewing hours. Don’t be subject to technological tyranny. You may not need that upgrade, that new electronic gadget - unless it truly contributes to making life easier.

5. Join a committee to clean up information fallout around your office. Talk about writing shorter, more precise memos and reports. Rediscover how to have brief phone communication. Make data visual; it’s easier to understand and compare, and is far more entertaining to the brain.

6. Remember the great mother of Invention: Necessity. Invent a solution for yourself and if it works, share it.

SIDEBAR

 A case study of our information society: the deregulation of utilities

By virtue of the insulation enjoyed through lack of competition, utility companies have had to cope with far less information than other businesses that compete for share of a market.

Marketing demands differentiation. Marketing demands communication. Differentiation and communication are information-dependent. Suddenly - relatively speaking - utilities have been forced to take a crash course in making friends with a public to whom they previously only sent a bill. With good information management, that bill can become a marketing device.

But relationships take work. To make matters even more interesting, modern marketers now must approach consumers not as manageable masses, but as whimsical individuals. That means more information, more strategizing, more research. New products and promotions. More data. . .

Consider Kenneth Lay, CEO of Enron, for example. Here is a man in search of relationships in a big way. A Business Week article with Gary McWilliams’ byline presents Lay as "the most visible and feared advocate of opening the nation’s $215 billion retail electricity market to competition." It targets his desire to make Houston-based Enron "a champion retailer" in markets all over the country.

If Lay is on the right track, the 600-person Enron Energy Services division formed last year will move rapidly to fulfill its mission - to develop retail services such as long-term, fixed contracts that would offset the risk of dramatic price changes, or a program that would allow customers to roll energy payments into home mortgage payments.

Good, innovative thinking. But has Lay backstopped his people with a plan for the day-to-day business of managing the vast amounts of information that testing and marketing these service concepts will generate? Is he prepared to build the databases which will not only support promotional mailings but tie back to provide valuable analysis?

He ought to be anticipating, right now, the stress level of managers who’ll have to review this future data surge and make recommendations that higher-ups depend upon to make growth decisions. A simple information management system that automatically reports data not as numbers but as more easily assimilated charts and graphs is one tool that could help alleviate this problem.

And if Lay isn’t thinking in these terms, there is a good chance one of his competitors - like Stephen W. Bergstrom, president of rival Electric Clearinghouse Inc. - is.