BOOK REVIEW: 'The Age of the Infovore'
Reviewed By David M. Kinchen
A few years ago, relates Tyler Cowen, author of "The Age of the Infovore: Succeeding in the Information Economy" (Plume Books, an imprint of Penguin Books, 259 pages, index, notes, bibliography, $16.00), a woman named Kathleen Fasanella asked the author if he was an Asperger's Disorder person or a high-functioning autistic.
He relates the anecdote in his quality paperback book, a work that stretched my thinking like the best books of the late, great Neil Postman (1931-2003, especially "Amusing Ourselves to Death" and "The End of Education.")
Fasanella, a devoted reader of Cowen's website, [...], described herself as an "Aspie," the current shorthand for people with Asperger's Disorder, Cowen said. At first he was shocked to be so described, but he writes that in the years since receiving the e-mail he's become comfortable with autism, "and indeed proud of it, but it's not a thought I was ready for at the time."
In the six or seven years since he received Fasanella's e-mail, the world has been transformed into a universe of information, overwhelming many of us, but not autistics, Cowen writes: "Autistics are the true infovores, as I will call them. They have the tendency to impose additional structure on information by the acts of arranging, organizing, classifying, collecting, memorizing, categorizing, and listing."
He posits that many of the geniuses of the past and present have had more than a touch of autism, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes. Both Doyle and his famous fictional detective exhibited the traits of someone with autism, albeit the high-functioning kind like that of Temple Grandin.
Cowen writes that Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist "has written on his blog that his history as a 'recovering nerd' is connected to Asperger's. It is perhaps no accident that autistics are known for their attachment to lists as a means of processing, recording and ordering knowledge."
Cowen writes in his book -- originally published as "Create Your Own Economy" -- that autistics "have, on average, superior abilities for pattern recognition and superior abilities for spotting details in visual pictures, compared to non-autistics." That certainly applies to Grandin, the subject of a recent HBO movie, who developed facilities for the humane treatment of animals by visualizing the structures in her mind.
Cowen also writes that Dr. Hans Asperger, for whom the "disorder" is named, wrote that "Another distinctive trait one finds in some autistic children is a rare maturity of taste in art. Normal children have no time for more sophisticated art. Their taste is usually for the pretty pictures, with kitschy rose pink and sky blue....Autistic children, on the other hand, can have a surprisingly sophisticated understanding, being able to distinguish between art and kitsch with great confidence."
Cowen explores the diversity of the ways we think, often drawing on traits of high-functioning autistics (He cautions us to put the images of Dustin Hoffman in the movie "Rain Man" out of your thinking). In his book, Cowen tells us how we can learn from autistics in the spheres of politics and sociology as well as music and information.
"The Age of the Infovore" will show you how to manage the massive daily flow of data better, no matter how adept you may already be at Facebooking, watching television, or studying for that test.
Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations" transformed how we thought about industry and trade. Tyler Cowen now delivers a manifesto for this century's industrial revolution: the information explosion.
About the Author: Tyler Cowen is professor of economics at George Mason University, Fairfax, VA. He's the author many books, including "Discover Your Inner Economist," and writes regularly for The New York Times and Money, and been a contributor to The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and Slate.
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