Information Overload in the Digital Era
By Maxim Behar
An excerpt from my book Generation F.
I am returning to one of the reasons for the “disappearance” of both religions and nations, or at least their gradual whittling away. Never before have people known as much as they do now, and we can hardly compare, even for a moment, the information contained in our heads today to what we had only a decade ago.
All too often, we cannot fathom how it is possible to store such a huge amount of information — knowledge, people, names, and facts. On the other hand, a large amount of memory has been freed from things we had to remember before — phone numbers, birthdays, historical and geographic facts, cultural information, and a million other things.
Today, it’s sufficient to enter what we need into any search engine — starting with Google, of course — to access everything that only until a few years ago we had to “carry” around in our heads and more. This excess of information has also led to
GREAT CHANGES IN THE HUMAN PERSONALITY, BEHAVIOR, ATTITUDES AND REACTIONS.
It happens all too often in social media that super-intelligent celebrities make petulant public comments or sound like they’re having an early morning kitchen fight with their significant other while quiet, unobtrusive people share keen and profound observations that we all feel inspired to write down. This blend of uncontrollable and very pronounced publicity, mixed with a vast amount of knowledge, made some people famous for their wisdom and sense of humor while crushing the intellectual image of many formed idols who used to spew sticky-sweet interviews from the pages of glossy magazines.
In recent years, there has been one more change in online communications and social media, particularly in business than in society.
Never before have people worked so much in terms of time, productivity, and opportunities to unfold their ideas to benefit their development.
Today, even the lowest clerk, who, up until a few years ago, held no sway in any administration until a few years ago, can give birth to an idea that can transform a business and make it even more profitable or influential. Each of us, regardless of his or her position in the office hierarchy, can now use every spare minute to think about our work, forecast, plan, calculate…
Many acquaintances try to “turn off” their brains at the end of the working day and shake the daily concerns of their work or business, but I do not know anyone who has succeeded. Let’s face it: This is what our lives will be like from now on, and the more we pretend not to care about it, the more we struggle and become just as detrimental to ourselves as when we fill our minds with all sorts of irrelevant stuff during office hours.
Generation F is about social media and the world, the people who run the world and how they feel, and how we feel during our transformation from Homo Sapiens to Homo Socialicus.
