SLAVE TO THE MACHINE

"Information underload"

'Information overload' is one of the Internet's big, bloated clichés.  It has launched a thousand articles and a million search-engine requests.  It is one of the Net's most pervasive and persuasive concepts - so much so that you rarely hear about its opposite number, 'information underload'.

Information underload is about the power of radio drama, and the vividness of soccer on the 'wireless' rather than the endless action replays on Sky Sport.  It's about Internet Relay Chat and 'online communities' built via pure text on a screen.  It's about the 'data compression' involved in telephone sex rituals (as Allucquere Rosanne Stone brilliantly observes in The War of Desire and Technology).  And it's about John Cage's most notorious work, 4'33" - four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence, played out against a conscious background noise: your own heartbeat, your blood supply.

Information underload is about subtracting sounds and pixels instead of their hyperabundance, and how this apparent absence of data generates more meaning.  The paradox is that less can mean more, and pure silence or absolute blank space is impossible.  For example, Malevich's all-white canvases show that visual emptiness is impossible because, if nothing else, a blank painting gathers dust.  It is always transformed by the patina of time.

[Image grabbed at RUC site]

Or take a more recent example: the RUC poster issued a week after the Omagh bombing.  As a public appeal for information, the poster was concerned not with the bomb's effects but its cause.  Not the blast and carnage, but what had happened just minutes before.  It included a photograph taken by a Spanish visitor, Rocio Abad Ramos, shortly before the explosion.  The image is simple yet haunting.  In the right-hand corner is a bright red car.  Through hindsight we know it contains a bomb.  Along the sunny street, around the car, are groups of people on a Saturday afternoon stroll.  But their shapes are blanked out.  Within minutes many of them, including the photographer, will be dead.

Through a twist of history, an innocent, 'ordinary' holiday snap is stripped of much of its visual information - the humans in the scene - and turned into a poster, then reproduced on TV screens and front pages across the world.  The RUC decided to 'blank out' the humans for various reasons.  Their white outlines seem like ghost-prints, almost like the eerie shadows left on the walls of Hiroshima after the atomic bomb was dropped.  To add to the poignancy, one of the white outlines is unmistakable: it is of a young girl sitting on a man's shoulders.

It is often argued that somehow people have become 'immune' to 30 years of carnage, massacres and explosions, that they have been 'desensitized' by an 'overload' of 'images of violence'.  Yet these white shadows of Omagh are the opposite.  They have become a major icon of our times, even though they seem to contain no graphic details whatsoever.

Michael Cunningham