From Medium:
They call this the Information Age.
And for good reason.
If I take all of the information we have today, load it into CD-ROMs (who even uses those anymore?), and stack them, one by one, on top of each other, the pile I make would reach past the moon.
In The News: A User’s Manual, philosopher Alain de Botton claims that “more data flows into the building [of one major global news organization] in a single day than mankind as a whole would have generated in the twenty-three centuries between the death of Socrates and the invention of the telephone.”
. . . .
We humans are not built for today’s information-ridden, fast-paced world — there was no Instagram or cryptocurrency to be found out on the African savanna.
What does all this information do to us? In exchange for what we have gained, what is it that we have lost?
. . . .
In the 1990s, the Oxford English Dictionary added a new word to its collection — information fatigue.
One commenter on Hacker News, I think, describes the feeling quite well:
My mind is in a constant racing state. It’s calm but not calm … My mind seems to have multiple levels. One of which is directed to what I am actively doing and one below it which seems to process information in a never ending manner. … Articles and books to read, shows to watch, things to do in my personal life and at work. Career advancement. All of these things just never stop … They just linger in the background. Shooting around saying me me.
It’s getting exhausting.
I know people who cannot stand to be separated from their phones, to be disconnected from the flood of information that spills out from the Internet. A simple human conversation leaves them nervous. First their legs start to twitch. A few minutes later, their eyes start to race around the room.
They have become cyborgs, and only another glance at their phone or smart device delivers a moment of false peace.
Link to the rest at Medium
PG actually likes lots of information, but he has no problems (well, no big problems) shutting it off.
Um. Um… yeah, I think my brain is on information overload on trying to rebut this silliness.
Although, this was at the bottom of my screen when I clicked through. In a sticky banner that you can’t close.
Oh, the irony.
On those African savannas, we learned to filter out information that wasn’t necessary, and focus on that which was. Nothing has change.
Yep. Prioritizing what we focus on and what we let pass by us is an essential part of human functioning. And like Dave says above, there’s a big difference between information and useless blather. Most of the stuff on the internet, most of what this article appears to be talking about, is just a form of noise. In order to be remotely successful in life, we have to learn to filter out noise in all its forms. Those who let themselves get bogged down by it become lumps on couches.
The root of the word information is inform. Information is that which informs. There’s a difference between information and data. There’s also a difference between information and time-wasting blather.
Or as I like to say, “information is not knowledge.”
I was going to respond to this with a lengthy answer, but just got a couple of notifications from Facebook I need to check first…