A Wealth of Information

“A Wealth of information creates a poverty of attention”
– Herbert Simon

In some parts of the world, it is assumed that most people who want and can afford, have access to the internet. I see advertisements saying “Rent includes internet. Who lives without internet these days?” I would say that the person who has placed the advertisement is living in a bubble. But does this person need to know about everything in the world? Over the past couple of years hundreds of Exabyte’s of information has been added.

Let us say that you are one of those who has the urge to know a little of everything that is happening in this world. You access news articles daily, probably watch news on television, read variety of books, follow “important” personalities on twitter, regularly check your emails, instant messages, watch new and old movies and search for other information on “popular” search engines. You are flooded with spam mails and advertisements as well. How much of this information do you need? What is the signal-to noise ratio? In addition you may not realise that you are living in a “filter bubble”.

Information pollution has an impact on individuals, businesses and society at large. But how can you reduce the impact of information pollution? Until unless you have read a book or watched a movie you don’t know if it is useful to you or not. Many corporations restrict usage of social media access of their employees during working hours. The question arises, why does anyone want to access social media sites while working? This is one example of continuous partial attention (CPA), in which a person is simultaneously paying attention to multiple information sources. Often it is an automatic process due to habit and not a conscious one.

The concept of attention economy discusses the abundance of information and how its immediate availability limits the human ability to process the information. This has lead to corporations incorporating intangibles such as personalization, ease of access and immediacy to attract consumers as reproduction of information does not cost anything.

In this ocean of information, how much is enough?