A Sea of Information
In our hunter-gatherer days, information, like any other resource was scarce but vital for our survival. Knowing which wild herb was poisonous, or which animal was friendly, or which tribe member was plotting against you was a matter of life and death.
Our brain evolved to treat information like our body evolved to treat sugar, a precious resource to be hoarded for future use. The original FOMO we can say.
No wonder then, that today since our basic survival is taken care of, we are struggling with the overload of both sugar as well information. We don’t need to process every piece of data that we receive, and we certainly don’t need to crave for more and more new information on a daily basis.
Yet we do.
This piece from the ‘Digital Culturist’ argues that today there is more information on the internet than our brains can every process and make sense of, and yet we just can’t seem to stop ourselves from craving more and more new information.
He argues that we are addicted to the internet. An interesting passage that stood out for me —
…technology and the internet are instruments of intentional distraction. As they speed up the flow of information, the mind adapts to keep up by hastening the cognition, which in turn shortens the attention span. This leaves no time for the mind to meaningfully absorb the information and leads to a frayed cognitive state…
Check out the article —
Drowning in a Sea of Information.
(15 mins)
You are the average of the 5 types of content you consume most online.
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