Richard Saul Wurman, an architect, graphic designer and futurist, has identified a malady he believes to be at epidemic levels in this culture. He calls it ”information anxiety.”
If you are afflicted, you instinctively know what he means.
It is the feeling you get when you realize that you will never keep up with everything that you think you should know. There is too much to read, to view and to learn and not enough time.
It is a condition that evokes panic, listlessness and guilt. In severe cases, you may imagine yourself buried under a huge pile of newspapers, magazines, books, business reports, professional journals, instruction manuals, investment advice, application forms and brochures about the bewildering choices among personal computers and sound systems.
Information anxiety is a term that opens a catalogue of complaints. It is not just the magnitude of written material that seems so overwhelming. You also are hopelessly behind in seeing the movies you ought to see, and you have been forgetting to tape that Channel 11 series on ethics that a friend urged you to watch. You even missed two installments of ”Lonesome Dove.”
At the same time, however, you are constantly flooded with a form of information known as news. It flows out of the television set around the clock. It pours from the pages of local and national newspapers. It spills from Time, Newsweek and U.S. News. It cascades from Fortune, Forbes and Business Week.
Much of it is fearful, depressing stuff. You are awash in facts, opinions and stories about famine, crime, terrorism and war; abused children, battered wives and broken homes; the homeless, the underclass and the unemployed.
You absorb dire scientific warnings about nuclear power, the damaged atmosphere, widespread drought, poisonous pesticides, polluted air and tainted water. You learn that the foods you love are your worst enemies.
You worry about Wall Street, inflation, recession, foreign debt, Japanese domination, the daunting deficit, S&L bankruptcies, mergers, takeovers, strikes and layoffs.
You fret about the arms race, the Soviets, the Middle East, the Third World, Central America, China, the loyalty of our allies, the deceit of our foes and, needless to say, The Bomb.
In your heart, you`re not sure you really know where Kuwait and Syria are.
ALL THIS, GERALDO TOO
Then there is the daily dosage of e engulfed by the poop, scoops and inside dope about Charles and Diana, Liz`s new sobriety, Elvis sightings, Donald Trump, sleazy sitcoms, Mike Tyson and Rock Hudson`s lover.
On a personal plane, communication is frequently frustrating. It`s hard to have a good conversation. People say one thing and mean another; they don`t listen to what you say; they`re only waiting until you finish speaking so they can talk-or you`re doing the same thing.
Meaning is garbled and language eroded by babble, bromides, banality, sarcasm, superficiality and evasions. Instructions on how to operate your technological marvels are inpenetrable; who can figure how to program VCRs, computers or telephone consoles?
Your only hope is to win the lottery and move to a deserted island in the South Pacific-one with a satellite dish and mail delivery, of course.
READ IT AND WEEP
Wurman diagnoses the disease, addresses the symptoms and prescribes a cure in his book, ”Information Anxiety” (Doubleday, $19.95), whose full title is a definition:
”Information Anxiety is produced by the ever-widening gap between what we understand and what we think we should understand. It is the black hole between data and knowledge, and it happens when information doesn`t tell us what we want or need to know.”
He concedes that writing a book may appear to be flinging fuel on the fire but explains that he has devised an unconventional format ”to reduce your book-induced anxieties.”
For one thing, you don`t have to read it from beginning to end: ”You can open to any chapter and read forward or backward.” The margins are packed with bite-sized ”anecdotes, quotes and references” that ”illustrate, expand on and sometimes depart from the text.”
To soothe apprehension about tackling all 356 pages, he recommends perusal of the 21-page table of contents, ”a good summary” for those who
”are nervous that someone will mention this book and you haven`t read the whole volume.”
If you wonder why your brain occasionally feels numb, consider the heading to chapter 1: ”A weekday edition of the New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in a lifetime in 17th Century England.”
Two margin notes provide further grounds for your unease. On page 35, Wurman cites an observation by author Peter Large: ”More new information has been produced in the last 30 years than in the previous 5,000. About 1,000 books are published internationally every day, and the total of all printed knowledge doubles every year.”
And from writer Linda Costigan Lederman on page 203: ”In one year, the average American will read or complete 3,000 notices and forms, read 100 newspapers and 36 magazines, watch 2,463 hours of television, listen to 730 hours of radio, buy 20 records, talk on the telephone almost 61 hours, read 3 books and spend countless hours exchanging information in conversations.”
Wurman supplies tips on how to eliminate verbiage, develop clarity in speech and put the deluge of negative news, which causes insecurity, in perspective. He notes that one physicist calculated that 5,000 to 50,000 people involved in the Russian coal industry die each year, whereas the total cancer cases ultimately resulting from the Chernobyl explosion will be 20,000. `ACCEPT YOUR IGNORANCE`
On a recent morning in his hotel overlooking Lake Michigan, Richard Saul Wurman, 53, didn`t look especially anxious. But neither was he a portrait of tranquility.
He was aggressively congenial, brimming with energy, seasoned by numerous interviews and eager to promote his book. Of the 45 books and guidebooks he has written, co-authored, designed or assembled, he said, ”Information Anxiety” is his first ”book-book,” by which he means the first that he himself hasn`t published.
Asked the obvious question, he wouldn`t capsulize the solution in a sentence or paragraph. After all, if the answer were that simple, there would be no reason to spend $19.95 plus tax.
But it doesn`t take a genius to conclude that the secret is essentially the same followed by pe The trick to eliminating information anxiety, Wurman said, is coming to know what you want to know. And that, in turn, calls for what he considers an important principle: the acceptance of one`s ignorance.
”My expertise is my ignorance,” he said. ”I had breakfast this morning with my friend Stanley Tigerman, and he said he thought that I was more aware of my ignorance than anyone he knows.”
Tigerman, the well-known Chicago architect, meant that as a compliment, of course, for Wurman has been very smart and very creative in channeling his ignorance into profitable enterprises.
The most effective expert, Wurman said, is someone who isn`t an expert. His method is to find answers to questions about topics that interest him and about which he knows nothing and to package those answers in such an attractive, clear and concise way that people are happy-maybe even anxious-to buy them.
Indeed, in the last few years he has become something of a one-man growth industry. In 1982, he founded AccessPress, the publisher of highly acclaimed guidebooks to Los Angeles, London, Paris and Rome.
His Access Guides, which Time magazine lauds as ”delightfully unorthodox” and which he shamelessly plugs throughout his book, also has focused on the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, football, baseball, medical examinations, New York City, the Wall Street Journal Guide to Understanding Money & Markets, the `84 and `88 summer Olympics and Washington, D.C.
Current projects include Chicago and Boston guidebooks and a completely different way of designing a U.S. highway map, all due this summer.
A SHOOTING BALLOON
Continuing his point about ignorance, Wurman said: ”There are three terrible lies that haunt us all our lives: It`s better to say `I know` instead of `I don`t know`; it`s better to answer than ask a question; and it`s better to worship at the foot of success than to understand the nature of failure.
”The key to knowledge is asking the right questions. I`m aware of this body being an empty vessel, and I have a passion to fill it up only with things I understand.”
When he describes his body as an empty vessel, he is speaking figuratively, for he is man of profound girth, somewhat suggestive of singer Kenny Rogers encased in the roly-poly form of comic Dom DeLuise.
”A strange, brilliant guy,” Tigerman said later about his friend.
”He`s got this perversely broad mind that`s filled with all kinds of actually wonderful ideas. He`s a futurist, a historicist, a Renaissance man. He`s like a balloon you fill up with air but fail to knot and it flies off in many directions.”
FYI: THE CRITICS
Wurman`s big break came two years ago when Pacific Bell Directory picked him to redesign the company`s Yellow Pages. His innovative version stands in sharp contrast to standard models; it`s cleaner, more informative, more accessible and a great success.
That led to offices on both coasts, 80 employees and a consulting firm-The Understanding Business or TUB (which, he says, refers to his shape)-
which tells corporate clients how to do what they want to do.
Not everyone has been impressed with Wurman`s approach to ”Information Anxiety.” One critic concluded that ”Mr. Wurman is apparently one of those talented visual people who simply have trouble expressing themselves, as he would put it, `linearly.` ` ”I wanted it to be like a long conversation, not like a traditional book.
”Speaking of conversations, did you realize that half our conversations are concerned with giving instructions? That`s the subject of my next book-`
The Structure of Instructions.` I`m also planning one called `FIND`-for
`Fundamental Information in Ninety-nine Diagrams.` There`ll be diagrams relating to everything you should know about psychology, religion,
mathematics, biology physics. I`m also going to do a book that makes sense of the `90 census. We`ll translate statistics into tables that . . . .”
Starting to feel a bit anxious?
