The Age of Missing Information

Bill McKibben

Plume, 1993 - Performing Arts - 261 pages

Imagine watching an entire day's worth of television on every single channel. Acclaimed environmental writer and culture critic Bill McKibben subjected himself to this sensory overload in an experiment to verify whether we are truly better informed than previous generations. Bombarded with newscasts and fluff pieces, game shows and talk shows, ads and infomercials, televangelist pleas and Brady Bunch episodes, McKibben processed twenty-four hours of programming on all ninety-three Fairfax, Virginia, cable stations. Then, as a counterpoint, he spent a day atop a quiet and remote mountain in the Adirondacks, exploring the unmediated man and making small yet vital discoveries about himself and the world around him.

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LibraryThing Review

User Review  - Devil_llama - LibraryThing

The author decides to watch a full day of television, and spend a full day in the woods, then contrast the two days and figure out which generates more (and more useful) information. For those ...

THE AGE OF MISSING INFORMATION

User Review  - Jane Doe - Kirkus

The wonderfully fluent young author of The End of Nature (1989) here softens the lamenting, doomsday tone of that book, counting on impressions of sweet nature to bring us to our senses. By ...

Contents

• II: 3
• III: 8
• IV: 37

About the author

Bill McKibben grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts. He was president of the Harvard Crimson newspaper in college. Immediately after college he joined the New Yorker magazine as a staff writer, and wrote much of the "Talk of the Town" column from 1982 to early 1987. After quitting this job, he soon moved to the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York. His first book, The End of Nature, was published in 1989 by Random House after being serialized in the New Yorker. It is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and has been printed in more than 20 languages. Several editions have come out in the United States, including an updated version published in 2006. His next book, The Age of Missing Information, was published in 1992. It is an account of an experiment: McKibben collected everything that came across the 100 channels of cable tv on the Fairfax, Virginia system (at the time among the nation's largest) for a single day. He spent a year watching the 2,400 hours of videotape, and then compared it to a day spent on the mountaintop near his home. This book has been widely used in colleges and high schools, and was reissued in 2006. McKibben's latest book is entitled, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. Bill currently resides with his wife, writer Sue Halpern, and his daughter, Sophie in Ripton, Vermont. He is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College. 030

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Age of Missing Information; Plume book
• Author: Bill McKibben
• Edition: reprint
• Publisher: Plume, 1993
• ISBN: 0452269806, 9780452269804
• Length: 261 pages
• Subjects: Performing Arts / Television / General; Philosophy / Ethics & Moral Philosophy; Social Science / Sociology / General