Book of the Month Club

As I continue to deal with the idea of writing more, the arrival in today's mail of yet another fat and glossy catalog of books (all recently published, and all discounted something like 90 percent) inspired the following train of thought.

I found myself glancing through the offerings, open the catalog's pages at random, and reading the descriptions of each title, each of which was no more than one or two sentences. A lot of information to absorb, most of which was immediately forgotten by me, and which was of dubious worth anyway—after all, what's the likelihood that the people writing those blurbs actually read those books? And what's the likelihood I would ever find the time to read any of these. Not some or a few, but any, meaning one. Quite small.

And this reminded me of something I came across elsewhere recently: that every day, I am bombarded by maybe 25,000 bits of information of one kind or another, only five of which are perhaps truly worth knowing. And how easy is it to know which are the five I need to take seriously and incorporate into my conscience? Beats me.

Meanwhile, the same thing is going on around me in everyone, in every person, whether or not they realize it. And with so much information coming at us—with so many books to read, commercials to endure, conversations to follow, phone calls to answer, and so on—we can't help but be diverging from each other at a dizzying pace. Every day bedazzles us with more things that do not bring us together in any way, but rather drag us further into a confused separation from one another.

How much easier it was when we had only three television channels, plus PBS. In large numbers, we shared the same experiences and cultural reference points, be it Bill Cullen or the Dean Martin Show or Walter Cronkite reporting the news. The media and the information flow served to bring us together, to give us a sense of a shared experience, even if it wasn't always what we would have wanted to absorb right then and there. But it was enough, I guess, to be a part of something that you KNEW lots of other people were experiencing at the same time. It was the shared experience of the theater or the cinema, perhaps, only magnified many times.

Now we live in an age of hundreds of television channels and radio station, and that's not even considering the role the Internet plays in reshaping how we experience life together. Yes, the Internet has allowed groups of like-minded people to share things where before it was impossible. But I think cyber-sharing life is a poor substitute for the real thing, no matter how isolated you are...

Anyway, the point of all this is to imagine a future where this dynamic is so out of control, that a decision is made to severely restrict the amount and type of information and entertainment available for the good of the nation. Without a shared experience, we lose sight of common goals and standards that bring us together and provide a stable society. But if we all read the same books or watched the same television programs, we'd suddenly be awash in meaningful shared experiences.

It's the same principle as the Book of the Month Club. In order for that to work, everyone has to read the same book, right? If they don't, it wouldn't be a productive time, to say the least. So why is it any different outside the realm of the book club? Doesn't it make sense that the principle of the book club (all on the same page, so to speak) would apply to society in general, to the profit of everyone?

Well, it's a thought. And it needs work, too...