I liked this thought from a mandatory reading by Neil Postman, former NYU prof. He's talking about how we need narratives to help us understand and process information. Whereas we used to have a shortage of information, today we have "wisdom enough to leech us of our ill...But there exists no loom to weave it into fabric."
"We have transformed information into a form of garbage and ourselves into garbage collectors...no stories to tell us what we need to know and what we do not need to know."
He says we need narratives to give sense to the information. The downside to narratives and other information filters is that they stereotype and simplify.
"I will give you an example. I grew up in New York in a standard Democratic, with a large D, household. And we had a theory which helped us manage information, helped us know what information we needed to pay attention to and what information we could ignore. The theory went like this. Anything a Republican says you could ignore. (Laughter) Now that helps enormously, right there. Now then the theory went on. Anything a Democrat says you should pay attention to, except if the Democrat is from the South, because they are racist and you don't have ot pat attention to them. So, this made one's political education simplified. All theories tend to simplify. That's the purpose of theories - to help people manage information."
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