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November 14, 2007
Consequences of information overload
Sticking with the theme of information overload, I ran across this quote from columnist Jeffrey Shaffer back in February (A drawback of the Information Age | csmonitor.com):
The old saying that knowledge is power still holds true, but how does anyone with a thirst for knowledge avoid being drowned by the tsunami of information that crashes over us each day? My fear is that many Americans are sliding into a narrow groove that includes a few topics of personal interest, and everything outside the groove is simply ignored.
A serious concern -- but not a new one. There seems to be two conflict impulses in human beings. One is to retreat into narrow grooves - something that we seem to have done since the dawn of time. The other is the hunger for information/gossip. The impact of TV news was to shake up those grooves for a while by playing to that hunger. For a while, I think we got the balance right. Not perfect, but close. We will see whether the new media will be able to find its own balance.
Posted by Ken Jarboe at November 14, 2007 11:15 AM
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