A few summers ago my decade-old, rusted-through lawnmower
finally bit the dust in the middle of the first mow of the season. At Home
Depot, I picked out a model from a brand I'd known to be reliable in the past
and happily drove it home. After I'd lugged it to the garage but before opening
the box, I decided to read a few online reviews to confirm the fact that I'd
chosen a solid machine.
Of course, I found the opposite. A full 15% of reviewers had
their starters quit on only the tenth start or so. The manufacturer repeatedly
claimed that worn drive wheels were not under warranty. The blade sucked.
They're "just not made like they used to be." Three stars out of five.
Sufficiently horrified and feeling like an idiot, I lugged it back to the store
and exchanged it for one that had a marginally better rating and supposedly less-severe issues. My almost-computer-illiterate father-in-law was amused by this
exchange and asked me: "Why don't you just keep it and ignore the reviews
instead of breaking your back exchanging it? You're probably in the 85% of
those whose starters won't quit."
I admit it's a good question, and it raises bigger ones. How
much good does a load of additional information really do? It might eliminate
uncertainty but does it also increase neuroticism and fear of failure and
mistakes? Information overload is far from a new concept, but is it still legit
to gripe about it?
The aspect of info overload that I often fail to consider is
that, in many ways, we've been in this position many times before. We all know
the revolutionary effects of Gutenberg's printing press, but consider that the
mid-15th century was the first time a human could come in contact
with more printed material than he or she could consume in a lifetime. Maybe
the first instance of overload as we know it? And replication technologies like
carbon paper and photocopying made the proliferation of existing information
that much easier and cheaper. Obviously, the digital revolution had the
greatest effect, in that our information now takes up zero space and can be
produced and reproduced at almost no cost.
Researchers continue to share data (more information!) about
the staggering costs of information overload. Linda
Stone posits that modern knowledge workers operate (poorly) at "continuous
partial attention," dealing with email and social network interruptions on a
continuous basis. She also found that people unconsciously suspend breathing
when checking their email, a phenomenon she calls "email apnea." Studies have
found that overload and email interruptions result in lower functional IQ for
employees and over
a trillion dollars in lost productivity for the US economy as a whole.
Although these days it's bandied about as both a corporate
and mental-health buzzword, the practice of mindfulness seems to be an
effective technique for combating information overload. Asking oneself "Where
does my attention need to be right now?" is a good start. Alan Jacobs, one of
my favorite writers on technology and culture, points
out that in our modern world "paying attention" is not a metaphor: it's "an
economic exercise, an exchange with uncertain results." Jacobs' statement that
"we should evaluate our investments of attention at least as carefully and
critically as our investments of money" is a profound one in this age of
information onslaught.
Information overload is not likely to go away, and will
likely get worse. Maybe in the future those who "win" at work and life will be
those with manic attention spans, who can switch gears within seconds and
consume more information as a result. The whole discussion reminds me of an
adage I frequently hear from fellow working parents of young children: "I'm
doing too much, and I'm not doing any
of it well."
Image credit: Beth Kanter / CC BY 2.0
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