The Void and the Flood: A Meditation on Information
By Bob Hembree
More than half a century ago, Alvin Toffler named our modern condition. "Future shock," he called it—"the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time." Standing here in the whirlwind he predicted, I watch as fellow travelers cup their hands to catch what falls, mistaking volume for sustenance.
In the spaces between knowing and unknowing, creatures stir. I have seen them move across the digital plains at dusk, shapeless yet somehow substantial, leaving tracks in the soft soil of our collective consciousness. These are the whispers that fill silence, the shadows that occupy emptiness. They are the stories we tell when official narratives fall quiet.
I once walked through a forest after rainfall. The air hung heavy with moisture, each droplet containing a tiny, distorted reflection of the world. There were too many to count, too many to examine. This is our modern condition—drowning in reflections while thirsting for clarity.
"What happens," you might ask, "in the spaces where nothing grows?"
The answer lies in observing what nature abhors most: vacancy.
The Alchemy of Absence
Joseph Campbell, that wise cartographer of human mythology, once observed: "In the absence of an effective general mythology, each of us has his private, unrecognized, rudimentary, yet secretly potent pantheon of dream."
Have you ever noticed how quickly weeds colonize an untended garden? The earth, like the mind, resists barrenness. Press your ear to the ground during those first silent days after the Chernobyl reactors failed, when Soviet officials spoke in riddles and half-truths. What grows in such silence? Not facts, they require cultivation, patience, and verification, but myths, conspiracies, and fantasies that bloom like night flowers, beautiful and potentially poisonous.
I wandered once through the Powell Museum in Page, where over 100,000 artifacts tell stories of the Colorado Plateau. Glass cases held fragments of a vanished world—river expedition models, ancient pottery shards, geological specimens, each labeled and categorized, yet silent about the hands that once held them. In that absence, imagination began its creative work—not merely cataloging but inventing, elaborating, connecting. "John Wesley Powell must have felt..." visitors would murmur, each completing the narrative differently, reconstructing an entire era from fragments of bone and stone, breathing meaning into what time had rendered mute.
This is what happens when information withdraws—we become mythmakers.
During those early pandemic days, when scientists still traced the contours of an invisible enemy, I watched my neighbors transform into storytellers. They spoke of secret laboratories, of microchips swimming in vaccines, of conspiracies so vast they could only exist in the vacuum left by incomplete data. Their tales spread from mind to mind, carried on the wings of uncertainty, magnificent creations born from the primal fear of not knowing.
"But what about those who seek truth?" you interrupt.
Ah, but what is truth in a hall of mirrors?
The Drowning Library
Toffler warned us of "information overload," that state where the accelerated pace of change produces more data than human minds can process. He could not have known how prophetic his words would become. Picture yourself standing in the center of a vast library. Books stretch endlessly in all directions—above, below, surrounding you completely. Each contains a different version of the same story. Some contradict others; many contradict themselves. Which do you choose? Where do you begin?
This is no fantasy—it is precisely what confronted citizens during the 2016 American presidential election, when foreign actors flooded social media with conflicting narratives. The strategy was not to convince with a single compelling lie, but to overwhelm with a thousand competing realities until exhaustion made truth irrelevant.
I've watched children at the seashore sifting through sand, searching for perfect shells. Their small fingers working methodically until fatigue sets in. Eventually, they grab whatever lies nearest—perfect or broken, genuine or artificial—simply to end the search. This is what information overload does to the mind. We settle for proximity instead of accuracy, for convenience instead of truth.
After the 2023 Israel-Gaza conflict erupted, I observed this same pattern—the digital landscape becoming so cluttered with unverified videos, manipulated images, and contextless fragments that even careful observers began to lose their footing. Reality fractured not through absence but through excess.
"You speak of both scarcity and abundance as threats," you note. "Is there no balance to be found?"
Perhaps. But first, we must understand that we navigate by starlight.
The Astronomer's Dilemma
Ancient seafarers knew something we've forgotten—that navigation requires both light and darkness. Too much light, and the stars vanish. Too much darkness, and you cannot see the obstacles before you. Information follows similar principles.
In Finland, where winter nights stretch long and deep, children learn to read the sky from their earliest years. Similarly, their schools teach them to read media with the same careful attention—to distinguish between genuine light sources and reflections, between fixed stars and passing satellites. This is their system of digital astronomy, training young minds to navigate by reliable points rather than chasing every flicker across the night sky.
The World Health Organization, during our recent pandemic, attempted to create such fixed points with their "Myth Busters" initiative—steady beacons to orient the confused traveler. But many had already learned to distrust such institutional light sources, preferring instead the warm glow of stories that confirmed their existing beliefs.
Imagine a man walking through fog along a cliff edge. He moves with absolute confidence despite his blindness to the drop beside him. Which was more dangerous, his lack of information about the precipice or his overabundance of confidence in his path? Both are forms of the same delusion.
"And what of those who master both the void and the flood?" you ask.
They become the new navigators.
The Cartographers of Paradox
The feather-legged spider, with its tufted limbs like ornate Victorian furniture, thrives in both desert and downpour. Unlike most of its arachnid kin, it spins webs without sticky silk—instead creating woolly, cribellate threads that ensnare prey through entanglement rather than adhesion. These delicate architects build webs that collect morning dew in times of drought, providing them precious hydration, yet remain resilient against flash floods that scour desert washes. What masterful adaptation to create from one's own body a structure that serves as both water collector and flood-resistant shelter, a technology humans still struggle to replicate. Our minds must develop similar adaptations, flexible enough to acknowledge gaps in knowledge, yet structured enough to filter overwhelming data.
When I close my eyes, I sometimes imagine us as ancient cartographers, mapping not land but information topographies. We draw boundaries around what is known, sketch dragons in unexplored territories, and learn to say those three essential words that neither void nor flood can diminish: "I don't know."
This admission, this humility, is perhaps our most powerful tool. For in acknowledging the limits of our knowing, we leave space for genuine discovery rather than convenient invention.
In Finland, schools have revolutionized media literacy education by teaching children not just to identify falsehoods but to embrace the value of informed uncertainty. Their curriculum explicitly trains students "to use doubt intelligently and to understand that uncertainty can be quantified and measured," as European Research Council President Jean-Pierre Bourguignon describes it. In mathematics, Finnish pupils discover how statistics can mislead; in art, they explore how images manipulate meaning; in history, they analyze propaganda campaigns. This approach has made Finland the most resilient country in Europe against misinformation—not by claiming all answers are clear, but by recognizing the texture of doubt itself as essential wisdom. Such navigation begins when students learn that questioning is not weakness but the foundation of true discernment.
Institutions, too, must remember that transparency isn't simply about providing information, but about acknowledging its incompleteness. The irony is profound: admitting what we don't know builds more trust than pretending to know everything.
Walking Between Worlds
As twilight settles over this meditation, the rain-droplets begin to sink into soil, feeding roots rather than reflecting light. This is the natural cycle of information—to be absorbed, processed, transformed into something that nourishes rather than merely dazzles.
You and I, reader and writer, we travel between two hazardous realms: the empty space that begs to be filled with fantasy, and the cluttered landscape where truth hides among counterfeits. Neither is our home. We are pilgrims passing through, carrying only what wisdom we can gather.
Look now—stars emerge as daylight fades. Not all at once, but gradually, each appearing in its proper time. This is how knowledge should come to us—not in void or flood, but in measured revealings that respect our capacity to wonder, to verify, to integrate.
The ancient and curious within us, that time-traveling archaeologist sifting through meaning's artifacts, knows that both emptiness and excess are different faces of the same challenge: learning to see clearly despite the conditions of our seeing.
Toffler called for "stability zones," anchors of consistency to help us weather the torrent of change. Perhaps this is ours: this mutual acknowledgment that we are creatures made for understanding, yet bounded by mystery on every side.
And in that paradox may lie our greatest strength.