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The Age of Information Bloat
How temperance of our attention is needed more than ever
When the internet was first introduced to the general public, there was excitement and hope around how it was going to revolutionize how the world worked. Tim Berners-Lee, one of the creators of the World Wide Web, had the vision it was going to serve humanity for the better:
“I had hoped that 30 years from its creation, we would be using the web foremost for the purpose of serving humanity. Projects like Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap and the world of open source software are the kinds of constructive tools that I hoped would flow from the web.”
While the internet has revolutionized the world, it has also, for better or worse, changed the entire landscape of how we human beings live our daily lives.
With the internet as we know it, and with the AI revolution upending the landscape once again, the number one problem we face is information bloat.
Once people got online, they were basically free to create whatever they wanted (given the accessible technology at the time). Blogs skyrocketed to stardom, the news went online, and social media unleashed the firehose of content creation.
“We are shaped by that to which we attend,” the writer Nate Anderson once wrote.
