Apple – the series of talks trying to think more deeply about technology – is back this Weds with the 9th event (7:30pm, The Betsey Trotwood, 56 Farringdon Road).

The title is ‘Digital Obesity’ and will be a panel discussion with Simon Jenkins of ShipOfFools, Gavin O’Carrol from the Digital Health Service and Vaux’s own Jenny Brown from the Awesome Web Co. In other words, it’s going to be fantastic.

I blogged a bit about the idea of Digital Obesity here and here and am convinced it’s an increasing problem: we just have far too much information coming in, far more than we can usefully use. So, just as excessive calorie intake doesn’t mean we have more energy and do more exercise, excessive information doesn’t end up with us doing more, or really even knowing more. We just get tired and bloated. And change channel. Again.

Another dimension I’ll be wanting to feed in on Weds is the alienating aspect of technology. I’ve just written a review of Nicolas Carr’s book The Shallows for Third Way, in which I write:

Carr summarises the co-evolution of our tools and ourselves when he writes that ‘when the carpenter takes his hammer into his hand, he can use that hand to do only what a hammer can do.’ While massively extending what we can do, ‘the price we pay to assume technology’s power is alienation.’

I think this is a fascinating insight. We are so very quick to extol the powers that technology gives us: the huge reach in communication, the massive increases in computational complexity, the ability to create new visual styles. But I think we have been very shy to admit the price that we have paid for these powers: the alienating effects of the tools we are using.

The parallels with diet are clear: our bodies have not had time to adjust to the huge changes in food consumption that we have experienced in the last 100 years. So we have got bigger and bigger. No one would want to return to the days of food scarcity, but we need to be open to the question of what unlimited consumption is doing to us.

In the same way, no one would sensibly suggest we abandon the digital tools that are now at our disposal. But what we absolutely must do is reflect more carefully on their use, and the fragmenting and alienating impact that these tools are going to have. And that’s exactly what Apple is about. So…you really should be there

I posted some thoughts on Friday about the problem of information coming too quickly for us to reflectively process it – and turn information into useful knowledge and wisdom. The analogy I used there was of a conveyor belt. When it runs slowly the packets come off at a speed that allows us to sort them, whatever our taxonomy may be. But when things are speeded up we get more stuff – which in a consumer world always seems good – but get so much so fast that we have no idea how to usefully use it.

I want to consider another perspective which I think may be useful here: our growing digital obesity.

Obesity is an energy balance problem: more food energy is consumed than is required given the activities we are involved in. Our inactivity and continued bloating becomes self-reinforcing: consumption becomes comforting, and energy use uncomfortable.

It seems that with the consumer-capitalist West’s problem of expanding waistlines comes a parallel problem: information obesity. We consume far more information than we can usefully make use of. Our data feeds (yes, isn’t that interesting usage that’s cropped up?) are always on, and always offering more. And the more information that comes in, the less we feel like actually making good use of it. The cycle becomes self-reinforcing.

We are simultaneously becoming the most well-informed and slothful generation ever. Knowing everything, and doing very little. Our bodies crammed so full of del.icio.us fresh information that we are unable to move.

The question I posed in the last post was this: how do we throttle the flows we have available, and carve out time for reflection? The solution is proposed was to give more time to sleep: that period when our brains are not receiving new information, but given time to post-process and connect up the data it has been fed.

How does this apply to information obesity? Well, it seems that sensible diet and regular exercise are key. What are you really going to lose if you limit the information you consume each day? Perhaps a dietary purge of your feeds, your follows, those Facebook ‘friends’ that you don’t know from Adam, would help. But that won’t be enough. We need action too. We need to exercise, to take the food we have been given and do something good with it. Scribble, protest, draw, think, campaign, walk, run… Because if we don’t, all of these creamy, sweet information is going to clog us up and lead our hearts to arrest.

We’ll be covering some of this at Apple 8 – Social Networks and Social Action this Weds, 13th. And looking at Information Obesity in particular at Apple 9 on November 17th.

I don’t mention a great deal here about my work as a teacher in London, but a book review in The Observer this weekend made me want to post something.

The thrust of Frank Furedi’s book Why Education Isn’t Educating is well caught in a paragraph in the review, in which Rafael Behr notes:

There has been some new law or initiative every year since [1997 when Blair came to power]: literacy hour, “Every Child Matters”, academy schools, Early Years Foundation Stage, the “Gifted and Talented” programme, personalised learning etc.

This process, Furedi argues, signals a politicisation of education that makes schools responsible for the correction of social ills. As a result, their proper function – as transmitters of the accrued wisdom of humanity from one generation to the next – is squeezed out.

Too bloody right. Having begun teaching in 97/98 it’s been clear over the past decade that the school’s role in loco parentis is now often taken to the extreme. If children are fat then we need to teach them healthy eating. If there are too many teenage pregnancies, teachers need to improve sex education. If children are depressed, or taking drugs, we need to now teach happiness. And if children do not agree with the policies of this government, we need to timetable Citizenship lessons:

By extension, teachers have become mediators in a process of socialisation – policing “values” rather than directing thoughts; a secular political clergy with the education secretary as pope.

Pedagogy, meanwhile, has come to look more like therapy, with motivational and psychological techniques coming to the fore, along with a fashionable horror of allowing children to get bored. Everything must be “relevant”.

The end result of this is a utilitarian curriculum where every minute of lesson time must be accountable for a dollar it will help earn a child when they grow up. Teaching Mathematics as I do I always get the regular question when we open the page to circle theorems or some such: why am I learning this – when am I ever going to use this in my life. And my answer never fails to shock them: you’re never going to bloody well use it.

A lecture on the essential uselessness of education follows: they will never need to know about Macbeth’s wife, never need to know about glacial moraine, never need to know 99% of the stuff that is taught.

What they need to know is how to think, because if they think they are free.

Which is perhaps why the government wants to fill our curriculum with all this nonsense. They don’t want education to be educative. Generations of free thinkers would simply not stand for the crap they are currently allowed to get away with.