Today is the third annual Information Overload Awareness Day.
This, of course, is what Bscopes is all about. And so we certainly want to throw our support behind this effort.
Tools Exist
The biggest thing I’ve noticed is that people seem to passively accept the fact that the noise grows worse over time. There’s no recognition that we can fight the trend. Only a sense of inevitability. Of the idea that we’ll never find the wheat we need under all the chaff floating around. But it is not true.
Lots of People Are Working On This
Here’s a quick list of some of the others who are talking about this today:
- Jonathan Spira of Basex at Overloadstories.com
- Mark Evertz of Attensa asking folks to Take Action on Information Overload Awareness Day
- Infogineering writing on Understanding Information Overload
- Josh Inator showing Proven Techniques for Information Overload Issues
- The folks at Unifiedinbox.com also mention that October 20th is Information Overload Awareness Day
- Alex Charles of the Information Sanity Blog is wishing folks a Happy Information Overload Awareness Day
- Heiddi Zalamar is offering suggestion while asking if you are Information Overloaded
- Nathan Zeldes of the Challenge Information Overload blog is also wishing you a Happy Information Overload Awareness Day!
- Stacey Reid is also suggestion folks observe Information Overload Day
- Hold Your Future blog is discussing Information Overload: Cubed
What To Do
- Tell your friends that there is hope. Point them to the tools and articles.
- Encourage people to sign up for Bscopes. Help them reduce their feeling of overload.
- Check out our blog page on Surviving Information Overload
- Tell us about your overload. And tell us what you are doing to solve it.
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WHAT IF INFORMATION OVERLOAD DOES NOT EXIST?
The core assumption behind information overload is that the information we want is the same as the information we need or like. Therefore, we cannot with good reason cut back on the information we want, because it reflects stuff that is important to us. Hence, thanks to the web we are overloaded with needed information that we can’t help wanting. However, from the perspective of contemporary affective neuroscience, wanting and liking are NOT the same thing, and are governed by entirely different neural processes. Thus, what we want is different from what we need because wanting and liking represent distinctive neurological events. Therefore, the key underlying premise of information overload that everything we want is the same as everything we need is based on cognitive principles that have no basis in neural reality, and the concept of information overload must therefore be abandoned.
The linked article questions the concept of information overload by challenging this most elementary underlying assumption. Based on the work of the distinguished neuropsychologist Kent Berridge of the University of Michigan (who also vetted and endorsed it), it is simple, short, and uses a Boston Red Sox title run to make its very radical point. Hope you ‘like’ it or at the very least the Red Sox!
http://mezmer.blogspot.com/2012/02/searching-for-red-stockings-myth-of.html