The Information Overload Myth

Many people complain about being overwhelmed by the amount of information that’s out there today. I never really bought that times-were-simpler-back-then argument but couldn’t articulate why it couldn’t be right.

And then I read this article that articulates very well why the information overload complaint is just a myth:

“A woman in a farm kitchen had a LOT to consider–just mak­ing a cook­ing fire took con­stant atten­tion, and infor­ma­tion about the kind and qual­ity of the wood, the spe­cific char­ac­ter­is­tics of the cook stove, the nature of the thing being cooked.

The mod­ern cook flips on the burner, and his or her atten­tion, freed up, diverts to other things. She or he has much less infor­ma­tion to deal with.

So what appears to us as “too much infor­ma­tion” could just be the free­dom from neces­sity. I don’t have to worry about find­ing and cut­ting and stor­ing fire­wood: I don’t even have to man­age a coal fur­nace. That atten­tion has been freed up for other things. What we see as “too much infor­ma­tion” is prob­a­bly some­thing more like “a sur­plus of free attention.”

Maybe that’s the real “problem”: a sur­plus of free attention.

Or maybe the culprit is “filter failure”. That’s what Clay Shirky calls the inability to design filters that can keep out what’s relevant and interesting from what’s not. Sort of like a great spam filter.

Either way, information overload isn’t the problem.

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