Douglas Hine wrote a wonderful piece at Aeon Magazine Thursday on information and its purpose:

 Information is perhaps the rawest material in the process out of which we arrive at meaning: an undifferentiated stream of sense and nonsense in which we go fishing for facts. But the journey from information to meaning involves more than simply filtering the signal from the noise. It is an alchemical transformation, always surprising. It takes skill, time and effort, practice and patience. No matter how experienced we become, success cannot be guaranteed. In most human societies, there have been specialists in this skill, yet it can never be the monopoly of experts, for it is also a very basic, deeply human activity, essential to our survival. If boredom has become a sickness in modern societies, this is because the knack of finding meaning is harder to come by.

Hine is absolutely right: information is not just an end. It should, first and foremost, be a means to meaning. In all our interactions and work online, we must ask the question: “What is this for?” Additionally, we must consider whether such purpose would be better achieved via a different medium.

Take Facebook: we may use it to connect with friends. That’s our “for,” our purpose. But are there times when such connection is better suited to an email, phone call, or Skype conversation? Absolutely. Consider Twitter: it’s a great tool for searching the news. But why do we read the news—for meaningless data? No, we seek out news to give meaning and context to our lives. Are there times when Twitter prevents us from creating such meaning? Yes.

But obviously, determining that Facebook is for relationship and Twitter is for contextual growth brings up larger questions of meaning: What sort of friendships should we cultivate? Why should we cultivate friendship? What is the undergirding context of life? Why is news important in the first place? The deeper we plunge into questions of meaning, the further we progress from technological jargon toward philosophical questions. This is what Hine’s piece illustrates: “The journey from information to meaning involves more than simply filtering the signal from the noise. It is an alchemical transformation, always surprising. It takes skill, time and effort, practice and patience.”

In the late onslaught of encouragement to be more “mindful” in our digital and material lives, I’m still just wondering what mindfulness means—or should mean, at any rate.

It seems our definition of time has a direct impact on this discussion of information, meaning, and “mindfulness.” Do we see time as a ticking bomb, a never-ending cycle, or a progression of seasons? If time is a series of finite milliseconds, quickening toward an indefinite end, we will always be rushing—though we may not always know what we’re rushing toward. Hine refers to computers and phones as “infinity machines” because of their limitless plenitude of information, but they do seem to hold a similar attitude toward time. One need only look at the discussion of deceased people’s Facebook pages and Twitter accounts to see how technology gives us a sense of infinitude and intransience. Yet without a purpose to progress toward, people become bored with their “infinity machines.” They fall prey to the boredom Hine references.

An older, more classical view of time is displayed well in Neil Postman’s book Amusing Ourselves to Death: he talks of a time before clocks, when people viewed time in sunsets and sunrises, seasons and colors. The hours were tolled by church bells, not cell phone alarms. Time belonged to God, not us.

Our modern information glut is often tied to an overarching desire for control and mastery—as is the “mindfulness” movement. We want to know, feel, experience, see everything possible before time runs out. The cruel irony is that, despite our efforts, we never know when the clock will run out: we have never managed to master time.

The person who sees time in a series of seasons—uncontrollable, transcendent, and directed—has teleology. He has a purpose, a direction that motivates him. Thus, for him, information has a purpose. “Mindfulness” means something beyond focusing on the present moment: it means proper contextualization of past, present, and future along an ordered timeline. As Hine demonstrates, mindfulness and information must not be sought for their own sakes: they ought to be part of a larger, more difficult search for meaning and telos.

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