Extreme Irony or Simply Information Overload

I have become fascinated as of late with the extreme irony I have been encountering on a regular basis. For instance, when I created this blog, I couldn’t help singing “INFO SUEY!”, replacing “Hong Kong Phooey” in the theme song of the 70’s cartoon of the same name. I, of course, had to find a clip of the cartoon on YouTube to bring my wife Richelle up to speed, since she had never heard of the show. An obscure reference, without question, but the very next day we got out the Sublime boxset I had purchased her over a year ago, and as we were watching the bonus DVD, lo and behold, the same footage of the Hong Kong Phooey opening sequence began to play along with a Sublime cover of the theme song. So, in summary, a nonsensical blog name based on a System of a Down song sparked my memory of a cartoon from the 70’s, which I had all but forgotten, which prompted me to find footage of it on YouTube, which happened to coincide with a song by Sublime, which we discovered the following day by watching a DVD from the band’s boxset, purchased over a year prior.

My first reaction to this amazing coincidence was how frequent such scenarios have become. One day I make a reference to some obscure show from my childhood, The Greatest American Hero, for example, and the next day I hear the theme song (“Believe It or Not” by Joey Scarbury) or I see the logo from the lead actor’s costume on a T-shirt in Hot Topic. This particular reference isn’t an arbitrary one; looking for the theme song to The Greatest American Hero is how I first became aware of the power of the Internet. My college roommate and I, during the course of one of our many inane conversations, began discussing one of our favorite shows when we were kids: The Greatest American Hero. Neither of us could remember the theme song, which nowadays requires nothing more than a simple Google search, after which you’re presented with numerous sources, but back in the mid-90’s, Google didn’t exist and even two tech-savvy college students weren’t aware of the endless supply of trivial information available through the Web. I decided to jump online, and within a matter of minutes, I was singing, “Look at what’s happened to me. I can’t believe it myself…” (the first lines from the song, for the uninitiated). I’ve been hooked ever since, which brings me to the most likely cause of what I perceive to be coincidental: information overload. I’ve become so inundated with pop culture that I can’t help but find correlations, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does shed light on a topic that I will address in subsequent posts: how information overload biases our perspective of the world.