Being difficult...

As I lay in bed this morning, debating whether I should get up, I decided to procrastinate a little further and so, at the risk of catching one of Radio 4's Sunday morning religious programmes such as Bells on Sunday or Something Understood, I turned on the radio. Luckily, God was with me and I'd narrowly avoided Sunday Worship, tuning in just in time for the start of Radio 4's A Point of View.

This morning's broadcast was a piece by Will Self entitled, Challenging Intellect. In this piece he argued that we should embrace the intellectual challenge of "difficult" books and art, and value works which are more taxing than our increasingly low-brow popular culture.

"The most disturbing result of this retreat from the difficult is to be found in arts and humanities education, where the traditional set texts are now chopped up into boneless nuggets of McKnowledge, and students are encouraged to do their research - such as it is - on the web."

I read the transcript of the programme when I got up and his phrase, "boneless nuggets of McKnowledge" has stayed with me all day. His comparison of knowledge to food and its acquisition in our information revolution age being akin to buying something cheap, quick and easily digestible at a fast food outlet is, I think, a powerful metaphor. It's a beautiful and potent phrase that I have returned to today - whilst cycling, at the supermarket, at the swimming pool. It has conjured up images throughout the day that have set my synapses alight.

We live in a 24/7 culture where everything is in competition with everything else for our short attention spans. It's a world of headlines, strap lines and catchphrases; anything longer is overlooked. I believe this to be a major driver in why we now have McKnowledge in place of broad understanding. Everything has to be easy and instantaneous; films, theatre, books, music - it's why so much of what we consume is formulaic. Once it's proven to work, it's repeated and applied to other genres and forms too.

The internet has revolutionised information; how we communicate it, how we access it and how we digest it. There is more information readily, easily and cheaply available to us today than we could ever hope to digest. There are, of course, many advantages to this but, as Will Self points out, there are many disadvantages too.

If you've not already done so, listen to his broadcast, Challenging Intellect.