I agree that it is exhausting. But it seems that it's a challenge of information parsing and application - not necessarily the volume of information itself.
I think there can be no doubt that the volume and accessibility of information exploding is a good thing. It will take time for us to find our rhythm with the new reality - we need tools on an individual and social level to cope.
More like an overwhelmed super power drowning in the info tsunami, confused and loosing its collective mind. With no architecture in sight to reduce the info overload just increase it.
Everyone these days is being overloaded with an amount of information -
they will never be trained to handle
that no previous generation has ever handled
What we are watching unfold across any and every issue, are symptoms of people breaking down due to that overload.
To handle this new over saturated info environment (which up until now has been sold to everyone as a good thing) one must look to professions that are trained specifically to handle such overload. And there are many.
Honestly, I don't think the problem can get worse. Or at least, it won't get worse because of more information. The capacity of the human mind for rationalization is already essentially infinite, people are manipulated because they want to be manipulated.
It's pretty much to be expected, the world is really quite complicated and without a drive for consensus independent thought would lead you astray a hundred times before leading you to water.
No one will ever have resources to suveil everyone and everything, given the rate at which info is exploding. People dont talk about the info explosion problem, cause there is no solution.
We live in a society where more data than ever is stored systematically and widely available, but we haven't yet developed the tools to cope with the resulting information overload. I suspect this is why we see popular trends like using Facebook and Twitter: even if people did have the time to take part in genuinely deep, creative, insightful interactions, there's so much to talk about that soundbite discussions rule.
It doesn't help that the media is increasingly full of superficial "don't make me think" material. Sometimes, it's the endless echo chamber that is most of the blogosphere and online forums: today, I reckon about 90% of the posts I've seen are just links to other posts that are top 10 lists of other posts that might, if you're lucky, include one or two original bits of writing. Off-line media is just as bad, with banal reality TV shows and sensationalist newspaper headlines boosting audience numbers because so many people just don't want to make any effort any more.
I think in the next couple of years, though, we will start to see a backlash against these trends. People will get bored of one-liner "discussions" with "friends" they haven't talked to more than twice in real life, and start to wonder what happened to, y'know, interesting conversations where they learned something or gained a new insight. This doesn't have to be highbrow or reserved to well educated middle classes: just "I liked this movie I saw the other day, because..." rather than "That movie rocked, because." would be a start.
As this trend takes over, I think we'll see improved ways of separating the wheat from the chaff. Just as search engines try to identify the best material on topics covered on bazillions of web pages but mostly not very well, so I think we'll see tools develop that cut out the middle men and go straight to the source of original, interesting material; I suspect the first social networks that enable this effectively will be the next popular trend.
Which brings us back to where we came in, which is to say that we need to have some original, interesting material to talk about for all of the above to work. That, one way or another, is going to involve either thinking more or sharing data that isn't trivially available to others, either because it's not accessible, or because it is but you still have to work out which parts are important enough to highlight. And how are we going to know that one bit of writing is presenting such content where many others aren't? Whatever the answer to that question, if a picture is worth a thousand words then we can be sure that good visualisations that pick out interesting data to discuss are going to play a big part in it.
Of course, sometimes you can be too verbose. I didn't have time to write a short post here, so I wrote a long one instead, as Mark Twain might have said. Maybe I could have just written "Current trend = banal & uninteresting => doomed; new trend = original & creative => interesting => successful; effective visualisations help identify original & creative content". Then again, that's more than 140 characters.
Yes because times have changed. People spend more time reacting to things they can't solve than on developing the discipline it takes to address them. Social media and news media are totally architected to encourage this kind of thinking and behaviour. And its costing us big.
Most people in the world aren't well prepped to deal with this overloading of complexity. Its like constantly bombarding a bunch of second graders with tenth grade problems. There are huge consequences to that playing out right now in society.
This concept that people with access to info will develop healthy ways to parse the info by themselves is total BS. Its like saying access to a library is a kid needs to get educated. If that were true why do we need teachers and schools.
With speed and scale of info delivery comes a responsibility unlike ever before to think about the unintended consequences. Its just not happening. People are falling over themselves reporting complex things whose solutions they barely understand.
This is a bit of a side point, but I don't think the amount of information is causing us trouble. It's the speed of it.
Every day we're being asked (or exposed) to so many new topics (and movements) that our attention has to get divided for minutes at a time amongst so many things.
And what does that lead to? Given so many things to pay attention to, we then have to resort to simplification -- symbols -- to decide what we want or not, what to vote for or against, when there's a world of complication underneath.
We go from symbol to symbol, giving our upvote that causes huge amounts of disruption to the people and issues that have to deal with the day-to-day reality after we've moved on to the next new thing. We gave our vote based on the symbol (which often doesn't turn out to be what we thought it was), with little thought to the consequences in the details.
I think it's a problem, how the speed of information is making life more shallow, yet more complicated and less satisfying.
I think a big - maybe huge and insurmountable - barrier to this is the sheer amount of junk attention sinks and outright wrong information on exactly the same medium that the good, free information is on.
Part of the solution is certainly better mental habits by information consumers, but it's not fair to expect normal people who are just trying to go about their business to bear all the costs of trying to stoically ignore this mental pollution—and it is pollution. It sucks that the business models of many websites apparently depend on bombarding people with 90% crap that you need to fight through to get to the 10% you want, and we ought to demand a better solution than "just suck it up."
What I think is happening to our brains is that we are already too fried from the over-stimulus of the constant "feeding" (pun intended with the term "Feed").
The endless treadmill of posts will always overpower you. Doomscrolling is an appropriate term for it. You always end up beaten. It's just too much for people, let alone your brain who has not caught up with the technology pace in terms of evolution.
I've slowly stopped using social media, though I'll never surrender my handles, that'd be leaving people to impersonate me.
While there is definitely an uptick in polarization, I think the more important and insidious trend is the increasing ubiquity of bullshit. We are flooded with information online, most of which is irrelevant or counterproductive to our interests. Needing to constantly wade through that in triage mode (with a judgmental attitude) has the general effect of wearing down people’s psyche and making them feel exhausted, anxious and on the edge. In that mindset, of course small things are going to set them off — but that is just the symptom, not the root cause. This is also a much harder problem to wrangle with because it is less specific. The causes of this problem are deeply embedded inside the incentives we have set up on the web over the last two decades — to challenge those will require answering some hard questions. At some level, people realize this (hence small efforts like the slow tech movement, digital detox, etc), but they are yet to find the right balance of convenience and sanity (for lack of a better word).
it may be true that there is no other path, but we really can't help but notice that the bulk of human knowledge is being replaced by literal noise. that is going to be a real problem.
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