Lately, it seems like I have been calling everything I’ve once held in my own reality as “truth” into question. So when I read this on the Harvard Business blog by Tom Davenport: Why We Don’t Care About Information Overload, I took it as yet another gentle reminder of “perspectives, perspectives, perspectives”.
In my undergrad at the Information School at the University of Washington, we talked a lot about… well… information. How to gather it, how to represent it, how to present it, how to store it, etc. We also talked a lot about that big bad beast: Information Overload, also known as, “ZOMG I have 500 million emails and 500 more million blogs and articles and papers to read and write and I AM GOING CRAZY WITH ALL THIS INFORMATION!”
That was over five years ago. That world was a BT (Before Twitter) world.
Five years is a long time in the Tech world, and Tom Davenport asks:
So if information overload is such a problem, why don’t we do something about it? We could if we wanted to. How many of us bother to tune our spam filters? How many of us turn off the little evanescent window in Outlook that tells us we have a new email? Who signs off of social media because there’s just too much junk? Who turns off their BlackBerry or iPhone in meetings to ensure no distractions? Nobody, that’s who — or very few souls anyway.
Why? First, there is the everlasting hope of something new and exciting. Our work and home lives can be pretty boring, and we’re always hoping that something will come across the ether that will liven things up. If I turn up the filtering on the spam filter or turn off the smartphone, I might miss out on an email promising a new job, a text message offering a new relationship, an RSS feed with a new news item, and so forth. Every new communication offers the frisson of a possible life-changing information event, though it seldom delivers on the promise.
…
I’m pretty sure Tom knew exactly what he was setting himself up to, like, a rather skeptical response from Mark Hurst.
There is so much that I can read into about the whole thing about “possible life-changing information event” that Tom mentioned, but I will leave it there for now. The thing I really want to say is, I’m prepared for all my long-held beliefs to be challenged.
Hey, what do you have against TMZ, Andy?