Information Overload OR Information Redundancy

China is in border conflict with 18 nations. Gold Price hits an all time high. Corona Vaccine is on its way. Cryptocurrency may be the new banking system few years from now. Soaring Covid-19 cases overshadow July 4^th celebrations in the US. Elon Musk seriously hopes to colonise Mars however, he scraps the flying cars project. Mexico seals off borders with USA temporarily. After India, USA and Australia are contemplating banning Chinese social media apps.

Phewish!! This and much more information inundates our minds and lives on a daily basis. With the ever changing times at a lightning speed, information couldn’t be left far behind. In times of the print era we had an option to skip from the front page to the sports page and we were done for the day. That’s all the news our minds could and wanted to  handle and pleasantly they were good enough for office coffee breaks or living room conversations.

Now, the information just spirals its way down through several tunnels and lands straight in our heads! No permission, no censor, it just lands. Each stream of information, be it social media on phones or our TV screens, is screaming for our attention. We no longer have that choice to choose the information we want to listen to.

So, like it or not, and however hard we try, we still end up listening to a celeb’s airport look to his kid’s idiosyncrasies, to the world being incensed with China to the latest on Netflix. We MUST know it all too. How else will office conversations make us appear smart. All the education and knowledge is no longer useful. Like fast food, information and more information seems to be the new intelligent quotient barometer.

While all this may appear cool, in our attempt to grapple with this information overload, there is a host of mental problems that come along with it. For instance, I wonder whether listening to the pandemic news did us more damage than good? Was it not the overload of news on this subject that instilled fear, panic and anxiety to absurd levels? It also created confusion. Along with information overload we are treading on the ever thriving ‘Age of Misinformation’, that has become an epidemic in its own way. Reliable sources of information is of pertinence here. Besides time is becoming a rare commodity and there is not much time to separate facts from falsities. Even fact checkers don’t have time.

Not only do we need to enhance mental flexibility but emotional balance as well to survive this information/misinformation overload.

Well now for the Paradox. Just about when we finish soaking up something, it is outdated & redundant and how! Obviously more and fast of everything means ‘that’ what was yesterday is no longer relevant today’. All that you read at the beginning of my article may have already become old news!

Managing change during a lifetime is a modern phenomenon. Nowadays change doesn’t occur over a lifetime or even over years but rather months. Today if you complete a computer science degree, what you learned in your first year of study is obsolete by year 3. Parents may no longer be equipped to teach their kids those simple algebra lessons or english grammar that they studied during their schooldays!!

Of course, some of what we learn will probably never change in our lifetime, such as the number of continents. But those aren’t the facts we should be worried about. We should be concerned most about the facts that change fast, the facts that change over the course of months and examples include everything from the populations of cities to what dinosaurs looked like or Pluto a part of the solar system? Information now has a shelf life and seems to have a high velocity of obsolescence.

The period of meso facts has sadly dissipated. Our knowledge which is depending more on information is in constant flux. In other words Information is a decaying asset and us, basing our sensibilities on it is not the wisest thing. Should we not make some earnest amends to the way we receive, filter and consume information.

To start with, a) let us establish our bonafide sources of information, b) let us read and listen only to what appeals to us and is of relevance to us, lastly and most importantly it would be nice to incorporate an informational humility into our lives. 

Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional character, Sherlock Holmes while depicted to be super intelligent on one hand, was also extremely dispassionate towards banal current affairs including some basic primary school information. He was quite nonchalant and actually proud of it…as it helped him declutter his mind and focus on what was essential to him in his work/passion…his case solving abilities.

So it’s really okay, if you are not the smartest cookie in the jar!!! 

Happy Selective Reading until my next  🙂

Author: Bhavna Gupta Patel