I think that having copious amounts of information (at least on the internet) is quite a good thing. For instance, if I am working on a research paper I want lots of data from which I can draw my conclusions. What about if you end up with too much information to effectively sort through or if much of your information turns out unreliable? The solution is simple: the advanced search. The advanced search is a wonderful tool that anyone can use to widdle down countless stacks of articles into a more manageable, more reliable ones.
Now one might say that the advanced search is limited in its use and cannot hope to protect us from being overloaded by the ever increasing amount of information on the internet, but I would disagree. I think that the idea of the advanced search has implications on all facets of our information intake in that WE, we as individuals can act as search engines seeking out that information which we might or might not ingest. Look at it this way, there is only a certain amount of information you can feed your brain without making yourself sick (sited in the article as “information fatigue syndrome”). For that reason we must and will (for the sake of self preservation) discriminate (where we can) what information we look at, listen to, etc. And as for information that is thrown at us against our will, I think that if we were reaching a point where that was becoming a real problem, we would could find ways to disconnect from and stem that ever flowing tide of information. I mean all it would take would be to give up things like twitter or (gasp!!!) Facebook and most of our worries about information overload would be gone.
And besides all of this, I think we are forgetting one key (and obvious) gift that MOST of us have been given. God has granted us the ability to forget. Sure we are inundated with tons of information daily, but how much of it do we actually remember? I for one can't even remember what I had for lunch two days ago, let alone most of the other stuff from that day. For this reason I think that as normal human beings, our propensity for forgetting things is a natural defense from information overload.
Now let me go back to the beginning of the last paragraph where I stressed the word MOST. What I meant by stressing this word is to bring attention to the fact that the writer of the common readings is not like MOST of us in that he is in fact a savant and subject to much higher levels of comprehension and retention of knowledge. Based on the fact that he is less able to simply disregard or forget information that is thrown at him on a given day, I believe that any views Daniel Tammet might hold on the subject of information overload are inherently biased. I mean how could Daniel Tammet's views on the information intake come close to being relevant when the very way he views data is so completely alien to normal people.
For these reasons, I do not believe information overload is as big of a problem as we have given it credit for.
I think you make a good point. When you need a lot of information, such as to narrow your point of view, the broad scope of the internet does just the trick. Much of the information on the internet is pretty much worthless anyways so it's a good idea to have a lot to choose from. From my experience, it is always better to have too much rather than not enough.
ReplyDeleteI also think that those who suffer from "information fatigue syndrome" should go on vacation. Sometimes it is just better to get away from what is causing you the problem. But I do think that those people have more serious underlying problems rather than the internet.
The internet is not the problem, it is how the world uses it. If you don't like it, you don't have to use it. Encyclopedias and good old-fashioned book reading can give you some information. I'll stick with the internet and get myself vaccinated against "information fatigue syndrome."
This is a test, this is only a test. I repeat this is a test. My hypothesis is that Dr. Prill is just as intimidated by the massive amount of blog responses just as I am. Thus I believe that he will not read my post since that is my reaction--to not read all of the posts. If he does happen to read this, I would love for him to post below to see if he reads them all...
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