Information Overload
My wife made a comment the other day that stuck in my head. She said, “I can’t watch the news anymore. I used to turn the TV on first thing in the morning and catch up on what went on overnight. Now I just can’t stand it! I refuse to watch any of it anymore, it just gets me too upset.”
She is not the first person to turn her back on the world, but to really understand how monumental this comment was, you would have to know more about the woman. This is a person who had to know everything! She would ingest the oil prices in Myanmar with her breakfast and then drink in the latest political scandal via talk radio as she sipped her coffee on the morning commute. Lunch would bring tales of sexual impropriety in the UK to spice up her chicken salad. In between meetings and conference calls, it was off to the World Wide Web where the DrudgeReport and Google News would keep her plugged in to the pulse of the nation.
Not listen to the news? Preposterous!
I blame it on too much data, information overload if you will.
News channels that broadcast 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Radio stations whose only break from reporting the news is when they switch to talk shows commenting on the news. Websites whose whole reason for existing is to collect the news from the broadcast media and distill it down into byte-sized, palatable chunks for those whose attention span is insufficient to actually sit through the local weather report so they can get to the NEWS. Even your favorite internet search engines have developed their own news departments so, while you are searching for a new knitting pattern or for naked Eskimo midget wrestling, you are never more than a click away from the NEWS.
So, Information Overload. That avalanche of information that has, if nothing else, turned us into a nation of sorters. We wade into the flow and attempt to pick out those bits that actually impact our lives, all the while resisting the torrent of irrelevant or innocuous data that threatens to sweep us away. The more successful manage to cull enough information from the flow to keep abreast of the hot-topic issues of the day. Others, not as skilled or simply overwhelmed, must choose to escape the flow completely or face drowning.
Most of us, not being specialists at data sorting, concentrate on a few issues and let the rest slide by like white noise. We know more information is out there but we refrain from even looking, preferring instead to recognize our limit. We tune out the discussions of AIDS in Africa in favor of the US Presidential Election. We disregard the latest sex scandal in our nation’s schools in favor of the heart-warming story of the rescued kitten. We pick and choose, hopefully finding a middle ground that doesn’t leave us feeling completely out of the loop.
So there I sat, thinking these heavy thoughts and wondering what, if any, information was out there on dealing with an issue like this. Being the self-proclaimed geek that I am, I fired up one of my computers, navigated to my search engine-du-jour (avoiding the ‘Top Stories” and ‘Headline News” links like the plague) and typed in ‘Information Overload’.
Yeah, you guessed it.
1,470,000 pages for ‘Information Overload’. It has its own Wikipedia, its own line of business, its own Harvard following and even a psychological article or three, all its own.
I think I’ll go and see if my wife wants to play cards.
Latest posts by David "Preacher" Slocum (Posts)
- 8 years later and nothing has changed - October 12, 2009
- Fund healthcare by targeting the infirm and elderly! - October 9, 2009
- Big Brother coming to a city near you? - October 4, 2009
- Olympic hopefuls, or Chicago politics goes international? - October 1, 2009
- Obama the shill? - September 30, 2009
Print This Post
The bombardment of information is definitely frustrating and overwhelming–but I’d also say that it’s because it’s the same information, the same stories, and theoretically the same facts on every channel, in every medium, but with a different spin; to the point that you can’t really discern who is or is not telling the truth. The wife and I watch ‘News Hour with Jim Lehr’ for news and that’s about it, and pick up other tidbits here and there, as necessary (sorting, as you’d say).