Overload and Boredom: Essays on the Quality of Life in the Informational Society. by OrrinE. KlappReview by: Michael C. HooverSocial Forces, Vol. 66, No. 4 (Jun., 1988), pp. 1125-1126Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2579443 .

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Book Reviews /1125

give rise to regular and predictable patterns of normatively constrained behavior sounds, at times, somewhat Parsonsian. Before Giddens is finished, there may be much in his work that Talcott Parsons could have appreciated, or even embraced.

Giddens' works, like those of Weber and Simmel, have a real richness about them. The Constitution of Society is the kind of book one could keep returning to, discovering new things. But it is particularly important to ask what this book adds to Giddens' previous work. It adds most to the analysis of space and time. Role relationships and activities are seen as clustered or "regionalized" in spatial and temporal zones (such as family activity at home in the evening and on weekends). Giddens rightly points out that society exists as the intersection of these regional- ized systemic microcosms. The fourth chapter of the book does a great deal to illuminate this complex subject.

The Constitution of Society does not present a fully developed, comprehen- sive, integrated theory. But it is a book that can stir one's thinking and serve as a valuable source for ideas. For those who follow Giddens, the book is one more developmental step in which he molds structuration theory while trying to make sense of the social world.

Overload and Boredom: Essays on the Quality of Life in the Informational Society. By Orrin E. Klapp. Greenwood. 174 pp. $29.95.

Reviewer: MICHAEL C. HOOVER, Missouri Western State College

Orrin Klapp is one of the very few sociologists to examine boredom directly, as a topic in its own right. Overload and Boredom aims to explain how a society could become perfectly boring because of great accumulations of information. Progress in "informational" societies has carried with it a deficit in the quality of life, and a major part of this deficit is a failure at the level of meaning and significant commu- nication, brought on, says Klapp, not only by the sheer volume of information but also by its degradation.

These nine essays develop a paradigm of information search which inte- grates the concepts of redundancy, resonance, noise, and entropy. Good redun- dancy serves social resonance, but noise and bad redundancy increase entropy by breaking down resonance and degrading meaning. In this model there are gener- ally two staetes in which one can become bored and also two ways of escaping boredom. Noise is the experience of an overload of information so varied and of such little interest that it does not fit into a meaningful pattern. Equivocation, ambiguity, irrelevance, and confusion are marks of this pervasive boring variety. Information in large amounts also becomes boring by redundancy-too much in- formation, so similar that it tells us little that is new. Klapp's essay on "creeping banality" is brilliant. His discussion of blanding is particularly sharp. Blanding is over-filtering of information to remove strong tones or rough edges from experi- ence to create a more comfortable insipidity. Products and messages are tailored to avoid unpleasantness to anyone. The tedium and evasive jargon of political speech-making is a good example of this, as is another highly saleable form of blanding, "cuteness."

Escape from boredom is to be found by variety so meaningful that it leads to

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1126 / Social Forces Volume 66:4, June 1988

learning and adaptation. The other avenue of avoiding boredom is by good redun- dancy. Social rituals preserve good redundancy and are the basis of continuity as memory and culture. This type of redundancy "earns its keep" and is not boring. Klapp's model of meaning search hypothesizes a normal movement of continual oscillation in which boredom is a motive for exploration and escape. There is a dynamic drift from the need for information and meaning to entropy as a tendency toward disorder and meaninglessness.

"Social placebos" that "mask the actual amount of meaninglessness in our informational society" are discussed in the book's final essay. Social placebos do not remedy the sources of tension, but simply make people feel better. Klapp sees four categories of placebos: institutions that offer material consolations, drugs or food, activity outlets, and vicarious pleasures. This final essay seems theoretically flat compared with the others.

This outline does not do justice to the conceptual richness of these fascinat- ing essays. The book is a must for those interested in the sociology of boredom, and, like Klapp's other works, it is a good read. It appears that much of the book is an elaborate reworking of materials in Chapters 9 and 10 of his Currents of Unrest (1972), but no reference is made to this. The focus on information neglects the peculiarities of person and culture: Is American culture creating more easily bored individuals than are to be found in other informational societies? Although not unflawed, this book is a gem; apparently that explains its price.

Five Scenarios for the Year 2000. By Franco Ferrarotti. Greenwood. 135 pp. $29.95.

Reviewer: IRENE TAVISS THOMSON, Fairleigh Dickinson University

This small volume might more appropriately have been titled "Speculations About The Future," since the "five scenarios" are neither clearly delineated nor ade- quately distinguished one from another. The speculations serve-as they often do in this genre-as a springboard for observations about the present. And the obser- vations offered here cover a wide range: from the familiar (e.g., that the work ethic no longer operates in America, or that there is a functional connection between poverty and wealth in cities) to the idiosyncratic (e.g., that the American must leave his house and take to his automobile for peace and privacy), to the trivial (e.g., that Michael Jackson's appeal lies in his innocence and fragility).

The first chapter presents a pessimistic view of "The Zeitgeist at the End of the Twentieth Century." Catalogued here are the familiar plaints of social criticism over the past half-century or more: the "crisis of the individual . .. in mass indus- trial society," the rationality that "has abandoned the individual so as to become an attribute of the big, formal, bureaucratic organizations," the "technical processes" that result in "the deresponsibilizing of living experience." Chapter 2 provides an intelligent discussion of the "difficulties, instruments, and methods" of social fore- casting. Oddly, it bears almost no relation to the rest of the book. The remaining five chapters sketch the "five scenarios" of the title.

First in sequence is "the anthill society," a description of an overpopulated world and its attendant evils. "Polycentric society," the second scenario, offers a

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