| Attention has limits. Focus, by its nature, excludes. When scarcity quickly turns to abundance, people take a while to adapt. That's most obvious right now with food; people are learning how to live with a vast surplus of unnaturally delicious things. The same thing is happening with information. When I was a kid, I was a vacuum cleaner. I read every word on every cereal box, because that was only thing I could find to read at breakfast. My first 300-baud modem was a gateway to miracles. Now there is more text available to me than I will ever finish. Once abundance forces you to start making choices, you must ask yourself "how much of this do I need?" I don't keep cookies and chips in the house for the same reason I've blocked Facebook on my work machine: I want more than is good for me. Or, so I can be more specific, remember that we're made out of meat. The meat wants more than the more thoughtful part of me wants. If I want more thoughtfulness, that means less distraction. Fewer blogs, less Facebook, disabling notification sounds and blinks and rumbles. More quiet. I love technology, but I don't always love what it does to me. |
I did explore the library extensively, some portions in depth, others not at all. Our consumption of information is by necessity highly selective. The real key is in who makes the selections.
In an economy of information abundance, most of the information you're presented with is selected for you by someone else, with their own agenda and motivations as for why you should read it.
This is among the most crucial reasons that I care very much about the ability for me to be able to exclude (and occasionally preferentially include) specific information sources. Advertising and marketing in particular.