The age of missing information Book

What is most radical about this book is the experiment itself, it's personal, bodily, i guess almost self-flagellating, akin to the film Super Size Me. McKibben watched one day of cable television, all 100 channels, 24 hours a piece; that is, he gorged on about 2400 hours total of America's TV output from a single day in the early 1990s. It took months to view, and included shopping networks, infomercials, and televangelism. Torturous.

Despite this, he manages to make a quaint little book--a quality I DO NOT appreciate. It has all the mass media trimmings, sugar-coatings. I despise sugar-coatings. ...And his oft-invoked Christian sensibilities, brushed on there and here--Unpardonable, sorry.

Then there is a rather weak device he employs as a counterpoint to all the TV consumption: He goes camping. It's again sugary, even in its more Luddite and supposedly harsher moments. Both his environmental concerns, his technological inquiries, and personal reflections become just quaint paragraphs mauled under by the ongoing litany of familiar programming of years past. Even if his intentions are to criticize the media and to dish on us (the readers) some of the familiar media glut, what results is that the very inclusion of so many titles and celebrities eats away at his approach.

Further, it seems dated now. Yet further, the internet boom must have his eyes rolling like slot-machines. But, to his credit, he is clever, and I actually do agree with most of his assessments. That we are awash in the information age, but that the quality of that information is contestable. That we have disturbingly forgot how to make basic things, grow food, and gainfully live with the Earth. That suburbia is an unsustainable and ridiculous endeavor born of privilege, destined to falter, producing citizens with skills attuned to nothing but itself. The lamentation of the apprentice system. The lamentation of agriculture. The lamentation of empathy.

But I'm afraid he thought this stuff was too apocalyptic, bad for sales, or bad for his own estimation of humankind. So he it framed up in a rather soft quaint way, thus it reads too soft for my liking.