Dave Gorman’s Too Much Information: not enough jokes and not enough information

‘Disappointing’ isn’t a word I’ve ever used about Dave Gorman before, but his book Too Much Information, Or: Can Everyone Just Shut Up For A Moment, Some Of Us Are Trying To Think is, well, disappointing.

It attempts to be a humourous takedown of the advertising and digital worlds and is often quite funny. Yet it is neither as consistently side-splitting as Dave Gorman is at his best, nor is it that informative for a book published in 2014.

The Daily Mail doing draft things? Questionable marketing tactics being used on Twitter? TV adverts based on dubious research? These and others are all things which other people have already written about, often many times over many years.

With most of his observations, Dave Gorman is neither the first, nor adds significant insight to what someone who occasionally reads about the modern world of advertising and technology is already likely to know.

The occasions when he does break into new ground are the best parts of the book, especially his very funny (and also insightful) exposition of why clocks, watches and phones have the time 10:08 in nearly all adverts.

When you get to the section on badger-based glove puppetry you’ll also both be laughing and understand why so many other reviews mention it.

Yet that section also shows the book’s weakness, for Gorman mocks the idea that being able to search inside a book, rather than just search its title and cover blurb, could ever be useful for someone deciding which book to buy.

Perhaps it’s just me who finds it useful. Which was the Graham Greene book I remember reading that was both enjoyable and had lots of jokes about Maltesers? The chocolates aren’t important enough to feature in the book’s blurb yet they are just the sort of odd information that lodges in the brain. Being able to search his books for mentions of them is just one example of when being able to look inside books is really rather handy.

Just as Dave Gorman seems over-keen to knock as completely useless things he doesn’t find useful himself, he also rarely delves into the story behind the absurdities that catch his eye. Yes, his account of how the Daily Mail uses stock photos of apples is funny – but it’s also a bit disappointing that he doesn’t try to find out why they do it, even though on the rare occasions when he does dig further behind a story, such as when he contacted a comment spammer, he turns up trumps.

So, a few laughs, the occasional piece of new information but overall – a disappointing lack of both.

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Buy Too Much Information, Or: Can Everyone Just Shut Up For A Moment, Some Of Us Are Trying To Think by Dave Gorman here.