Too Much Information?

If it Affects Our Attention, Yes

Is it possible to fill up your head with so much information that there’s no room left?

...for other information that comes from things like listening to your heart (which, I suspect, is where most of our sustained agency comes from), your body, etc.

Information is slightly above data.  It is organized data.  It points at something.  It isn't knowledge, it's just...information.  Out there; pointing at something, drawing our attention.  But, especially when there is too much of it, relatively meaningless.  It just is.

Knowledge is the accumulation of information and the organization of it, at a higher level.  A more meaningful level.  It understands the connections in information and identifies what is significant.  It can lead towards application.  But, it falls short of it.  You can know something, but still not do anything with it.

Wisdom is the application of knowledge, the appropriation of it.  It is awareness of what is needed where, when, and how it might be useful.

So, what happens when any one of the pieces along this spectrum take on the elements of caricature?  In other words, when it explodes and takes over the rest?

Like the problem we now seem to have—too much information.  When it simply feeds on itself and gets bloated, but doesn't go anywhere.  When it sucks us into itself and we spend hours and hours each day digesting it, to the point where it no longer occurs to us what the point of it really is any more.  It appears that we can forfeit the value in information because there is so much of it that we fall into a trance of simply being entertained by it.  When this happens, we not only lose track of what is meaningful, but also the skills needed to make that determination.  We just consume it, until we fall asleep, rather than identifying much of anything that could be done with it (not to mention the actual doing of it).

There are, perhaps, seasons of life where we don’t have the information that we need to do what needs to be done. But, there is also a point at which we don’t really need any more information. We have more than enough already. We just need to do the things that need to be done.

One appeal of more information (to some) is that it could be useful for a final point-of-action—either to prevent something unnecessary (not to mention unfortunate) or to enhance the likelihood of a better result.  The seduction of more information, however, is that it effectively eludes the more important reality that something just needs to be done. There is a point at which doing something is better than waiting for a more perfect version of that something, especially when what needs to be done is not being done at all.

Assuming any of this is true, maybe the question should go a little deeper than simply suggesting that the locus of the problem is with information itself.

What if the real question is about our relationship with it.  That, at the very least, would require more of us (than simply more information would).

What if the questions we should be asking are more related to the relationship between information and our attention?

...unless that's just more information.

Attention isn't free. It's the most valuable thing you spend.

-- Shane Parrish