BEAST Magazine #1 2015

34
#Entertainment | Ideas
RICHARD SAUL WURMAN
INTERVIEW SPEAKER ICT SPRING 2016
INTERVIEW MICHAËL RENOTTE
25 years ago, in your book Information Anxiety,
you were expressing concern about the gap
between data and knowledge as well as between
what we understand and what we think
we should understand. What is this breach
and how does it cause anxiety?
«Ok, let’s get back to the beginning. Everything else
I do, to me, is the ordinary basic way of thinking
about this. When you go back 25 years and talk
about the information anxiety, basically is the fact
that I read things that I don’t understand. I look
at the front page of the newspaper, I read the
headline of the New York Times or some story –
even if it’s a long story in continued – and I can’t
hope to find the simplest of questions answered.
What is the fact? Where did it take place? I just
can’t get the simplest question answered!»
«There is a big gap between what we think is
information - a word that is mostly dominated by
the part of the word inform – and what we think
information should be. And it doesn’t inform me.
So if information doesn’t inform me, there is
obviously a gap between what we think should
inform us and what actually informs us. And that
is the anxiety we have. All this stuff around us
we should understand because after all it’s words
– it’s in the New York Times, in the Wall Street
Journal – it’s something that we think should be
understandable.
But it isn’t. And we don’t understand school; we
don’t understand most professors because most
professors have the disease of familiarity: they are
so familiar with the subjects that they miss the
way in. The door is some place over the horizon:
they want you to lose those few first steps and
so you never understand the subject. And what
is stupid is just that they don’t understand what
it’s like not to understand. They’ve lost the ability
a long time ago. That ability is my fundamental
continuous continuum of thought process all day
long: understand what it’s like to not understand.»
BEAST MAGAZINE #1
It seems that you are a pretty atypical
personality. How would you describe yourself
to someone who does not know you?
«Elephants walking around think that all the
other animals are peculiar. They don’t think to
themselves being peculiar, having a long trunk
and big ears, and being so large, apparently loving
their children and the other elephants. They
don’t think that it’s peculiar, because that’s the
elephant life, that’s who they are! Likewise, I don’t
think I am in any way different. I think everybody
else is different. So I think I am hyper-normal,
I think that I am more normal than other people.»
«I see no alternative but designing your life. To me,
that’s the big design problem. I don’t understand
the idea of asking somebody «How is everything
going?», because it’s a moron question. I can’t
answer that question or nod to something I don’t
understand, making believe I do understand it:
it’s something that seems interesting but I want
to seem smart. I don’t understand that continual
lie of things. Well, other people do and I won’t
criticize them. That’s fine for them.»
«I don’t find that doing what I do is in a list of
‘unusual’: I’m on that side of the street and I want
to get to the other side, so I figure out a way of
going there without getting killed or hurt. It’s a
journey. It’s your own journey and you do it by
yourself. And so I find that I am ordinary, that I
have an ordinary life that’s interesting to me, and
would not be interesting to others. I accept the
fact that comfort is not my friend even though
I was taught that one should always strive for
comfort but I don’t find that unusual.
It was an early discovery that actually terror is my
friend and that along with terror, I’m confident;
not in a braggadocio sense but I know how to do
something because I’m always kept in check by
this gentleman walking right next to me and in
my same body of terror. To me, everybody must
feel that way. Or at least it’s my operative to feel
that everybody else feels that way because it
would be really uncomfortable to feel that I was
different.»
© James Duncan Davidson