OVERFLOW OF INFORMATION

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 772, 7 May 1954, Page 5

OVERFLOW OF INFORMATION

»sir,-If I may be permitted to say so, what an exceedingly narrow viewpoint is expressed in your editorial entitled "The Overflow of Information." By means of selected samples you give the impression that most, if not all, of the collections of data that are made "by private or semi-public bodies, State departments all over the world, and every agency of the United Nations," are so much wasted time and effort. Has it never occurred to you, sir, that just because your editorial staff sees little value in many of these surveys from a newspaper point of view, ,that is no justification for condemning them out of hand, labelling them as "cemeteries of facts .. . facts that nobody wants to know." You admit that there are, presumably, good reasons for these investigations, but imply that because the reasons are not easy (for the staff of the New Zealand Listener) to discover, therefore there can be little justification for their existence. Too often, in a democracy, do we pay homage to the belief that one man’s opinion is as good as another’s. Unfortunately, the man who shouts the loudest and most often will be listened to; other voices are lost or silenced. A survey designed to discover the views of an accurate cross-section of the community should enable those who have the responsibility of looking’ after the welfare of the citizens in general to know what the average man feels about any particular issue. In this way the insidious influence of pressure-groups can be counteracted-but only if we are able to ignore the loud protestations of small groups and listen to the voice of the average man-in-the-street. You speak of wasted effort, but you give no space to the waste of time spent in arguments based on generalised interpretations of public opinion, expressions of personal opinion with no factual basis. If a State department spends several thousands of pounds annually on, say, accident prevention advertisements, is it not highly desirable that the department concerned knows whether the advertisements are being tread, and if they are, by whom? Perhaps my examples are also selective. The answer may lie somewhere between the two extremes. But your editorial as it stands gives the erroneous impression that the collection of facts is little more than a magpie habit, and therefore to be condemned. "It is depressing to think of the work that goes vainly into the preparation of so many documents" when they meet with such misunderstanding as to purpose and in-

tention.

A. A.

CONGALTON

CW. ellington).

(Our quarrel was not with fact-finding as such, but with fact-finding gone to seed.-Ed.)