In 2006 alone, the world produced 161 exabytes of digital data, the equivalent of three million times the information contained in all the books ever written.
This tidbit is from the Columbia Journalism Review. Are we all suffering from TMI, aka, Too Much Information?
I listen to podcasts regularly, and then there’s NPR programmed into my car stereo, and all the news reading I do online every day, hour after hour. In this day and age, we have the ability to gather and share information quickly an easily minute after minute, hour after hour. I get up in the morning to find that there are new articles in my RSS feed, or new articles on the local news sites, or new articles on the tech sites I visit, and it’s barely dawn. Someone was writing those articles, at all times of the day or night.
The real question is, are we suffering from information overload, responding in extreme fear to events that BTI (Before The Internet) we didn’t always know about? And how much is too much? I remember after September 11th, I was glued to television and Internet for information. After about four or five days, one of my friends confessed to me that she felt overwhelmed and just had to unplug for a while. I knew exactly how she felt, as I’d been feeling it too. And sometimes, it’s not that I feel overwhelmed, but I almost feel desensitized by all the of the information pouring in.
In fact, brain research shows that we do our best thinking when we’re not engaged and focused, yet fewer of us have time for downtime when we are allowing technology and information overload to take over. So if we are spending the majority of our time being “connected” and taking in information, how can we have the “down time” required to think up our best ideas and solutions?
Is it time to tune out, unplug, and re-sensitize?
I know one of the reasons I don’t Twitter is because of the sheer amount of time and “connectedness” I’d have to employ to maintain it. It is also the reason I do not have a smart phone and refuse to get one. I am online all day and am available on instant messenger for anyone who needs me, and on Facebook regularly to stay connected with my kids and friends and events I may be involved in. I’m already feeling too locked in and too connected from those things, yet I keep doing them. Now I have to wonder if my creative ideas are being suppressed in all the “busy-ness” of all of my connections and information resources. It’s too easy for me to be online, virtually anywhere and any time, with a laptop under my arm and WiFi everywhere I go.
Maybe it’s time to take at least a short step back. Maybe I’ll find it isn’t so bad to be a little less connected.