Are we on information overload? (2012)

I hate it.

I believe it comes down to the fact that most things are optimised for different things than what you use or want it for.

i.e the best social network would connect you to the world, let you see what was important and give you that as easily and quickly as possible so you can spend as much of your life enjoying actual life and less using the tool, however it's ad supported and there goal is to keep you on it as much as possible, so they have to give you a little of what you want, so they can get as much of what they want as possible.

And it's the same as anything, you want news, you want to be informed, they want clicks and page views, most news it could be enough to just read the headline, but they have to put it in a clickbait way and then burry the important sentence within a huge article of adverts, what's worse is that sentence wasn't even that relevant when you actually found it.

Youtube should be great for content, but it becomes a business and 'content creators' are't really producing that valuable content, they are producing content that feeds the algorithm and grows there subscribers, there can be some value in it but the value is massively diluted by any major content creator to fit in with the rules.

It's annoying and I haven't found a solution. It feels like a losing battle.

I agree that it is exhausting. But it seems that it's a challenge of information parsing and application - not necessarily the volume of information itself.

I think there can be no doubt that the volume and accessibility of information exploding is a good thing. It will take time for us to find our rhythm with the new reality - we need tools on an individual and social level to cope.

I disagree. It's still pretty difficult to come across neutral, high-quality and well-presented information; not as difficult as when you had to walk to a library and hope that your topic is well covered, but it certainly isn't constantly thrown at you for free in the form of 30-second video clips.

At least for me, the feeling of overload comes from filler and clickbait, not information. They trigger the expectation of satisfaction, consume mental processing power, and then disappoint, leading to frustration.

Pundits have been saying that we are in an information overload since the 60s. I think people have responded by getting better at filtering unwanted information.