ario's digital detritus - info overload, a response

A student in the program I came out of at UW sent me a well thought out paper on the topic of information overload. Here's an excerpt from my response to him:

The topic of information overload isn't easy to explore. The problem is different from person to person and varies wildly by culture. I've been thinking about it for years and "a struggle" is the best way I can describe it.

I think it boils down to the age old battle between the Buddhist idea of letting go of desire vs the very Western idea of continual progress (and striving to be the "best"). The internet provides us with the ability to become knowledgeable on a wide variety of subjects in a way that would take much longer to achieve via traditional print media. But as Postman points out, the Faustian bargain here is that we rarely go deep into any one subject... we're a mile wide and an inch deep as the expression goes.

I think it's still up in the air to see what this will do to society as time moves on. What does a society comprised of super generalists and a handful of specialists look like?

In my job, I'm constantly thinking about the right balance between putting people in the path of more useful information vs the cost of having more noise to deal with. Twitter is a great example of this dichotomy. I find some really nifty things via Twitter and it's a great tool to keep up with my friends (especially those who I don't see in person often), but there's a hefty tax to pay for this benefit in terms of time and the mental energy it takes to sift through all the tweets I don't care about.

Another factor in all of this is how our tastes change as we get older. A stream of information I may have found interesting in the past may no longer be useful to me anymore, so there's this constant interplay of taking in new streams and unfollowing old ones.

The thing to learn in all of this is just because you can expose yourself to something, it doesn't mean you should. If memory serves, there's a science experiment where they give a mouse unlimited access to tasty food. The mouse can't help himself and eats to the point where it eventually dies. There are documented cases of this in the massive multiplayer game world where gamers die from playing the game for 3-4 days straight without a break. Obviously this addictive drive still exists in humans, to varying degrees of course, but it's there. We get the same kind of dopamine squirt in the brain when we learn something new or from processing a ton of information like taking an inbox of 200 emails down to zero... I've heard people describe such information processing as a "rush." The question I ask myself is "am I a happier, better person from all of this digital interaction?" The jury is still out on that one :)

taken from here.