Knowledge, line 22: weather maps - an annoyance of mine. Previously, newspapers et al published weather forecasts complete with isobars etc. Then, to be 'user-friendly' they abandoned the isobars and used silly pictograms of sun and rain etc instead, effectively dumbing down the reader/viewer who could not now analyse the forecast for himself.
Note: There is little new under the sun. Shortly after writing this poem I reread T. S. Eliot's 'Choruses from The Rock', written in 1934, and was surprised to find in the first chorus: "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?/ Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" - which rather adumbrates my own poem in reverse.
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1. Information
What purpose thumb-jerk scrolling as the train
Embattles over points, its office horde
Sweat-weary on their day-end haul to suburbs
Mute under purple skies? The byte-fed skein
Of information, shrilled with panic verbs,
Enwebs the gorging mind, agog but bored:
There’s texting, surfing, tweeting, sampling feeds
Whilst breasting mayhem on pitched tablet games,
Neck-cricked to earphoned hip-hop all the while.
Through flaring windows starlings bate their needs
Flocked in the fields, prodding a dead-seed dung pile
Like fingers stabbing icons; flashed in the flames
Of twilight they lurch like cartoon combatants
Made infant by ungratified desires:
Likewise, their sapped observers blurting by,
By finger-interest provoke their wants
Of leisure, news and sport, which mob the eye,
Led by emoticons to grins or ires.
Where once a federated happenstance
Gave scope and limit to the throb of facts,
Now dressed-down integers 'embrace their space'
Cravingly unfulfilled by scroll and glance.
For these have never sat before the mace,
Distincting grounded truths from claims and acts;
Worlded in information like a fog,
Only a cleft which swords the torqueing mass
Can gift a vision of the land’s outstretch,
Spying a path to homesteads in the smog;
For facts themselves in mindless pitch and fetch
Are lump as Caliban not bright as glass,
Untooled to context which alone yields light.
So, sunk in surfeit, these loafish feeders bloat,
Suborned by data like the unfree free,
And when that train shrieks to the platform’s bight
It groans the slave song of autonomy,
Void data throttling what it should denote.
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1. Information
What purpose thumb-jerk scrolling as the train
Embattles over points, its office horde
Sweat-weary on their day-end haul to suburbs
Mute under purple skies? The byte-fed skein
Of information, shrilled with panic verbs,
Enwebs the gorging mind, agog but bored:
There’s texting, surfing, tweeting, sampling feeds
Whilst breasting mayhem on pitched tablet games,
Neck-cricked to earphoned hip-hop all the while.
Through flaring windows starlings bate their needs
Flocked in the fields, prodding a dead-seed dung pile
Like fingers stabbing icons; flashed in the flames
Of twilight they lurch like cartoon combatants
Made infant by ungratified desires:
Likewise, their sapped observers blurting by,
By finger-interest provoke their wants
Of leisure, news and sport, which mob the eye,
Led by emoticons to grins or ires.
Where once a federated happenstance
Gave scope and limit to the throb of facts,
Now dressed-down integers 'embrace their space'
Cravingly unfulfilled by scroll and glance.
For these have never sat before the mace,
Distincting grounded truths from claims and acts;
Worlded in information like a fog,
Only a cleft which swords the torqueing mass
Can gift a vision of the land’s outstretch,
Spying a path to homesteads in the smog;
For facts themselves in mindless pitch and fetch
Are lump as Caliban not bright as glass,
Untooled to context which alone yields light.
So, sunk in surfeit, these loafish feeders bloat,
Suborned by data like the unfree free,
And when that train shrieks to the platform’s bight
It groans the slave song of autonomy,
Void data throttling what it should denote.
