WITH THE development of communication and technology in today’s society, we suddenly have access to all kinds of information. The Internet fuels a 24-hour database that is constantly being updated by billions of people from all around the world. Now, everything we will ever need to know (and more) is contained in a device that fits in the palm of our hands. But sometimes, the endless pages that come up with one Google search feel intimidating.
Information overload is a state of feeling overwhelmed by the information one is receiving to the point that one is unable to think clearly and, ironically, feels less knowledgeable. It’s that feeling you get after hours of researching for a paper when your head starts throbbing, your back begins aching, and your eyes become strained. At that point, you know you just can’t learn anything more about the topic.
Everything new you read suddenly becomes some form of ancient Latin–incomprehensible and uninformative, and so you take a break or move on to something else. According to an article from Business Research, this is a typical occurrence in research-centric occupations, but what we don’t realize is that this phenomenon has already buried itself deep into our everyday life.
Every time we check our Facebook walls and refresh our Twitter timelines, there seems to be a new issue or viral post going around. We put our phone away for an hour and we have suddenly missed out on everything that is happening in the world. Consequently, there is a pressure to be updated and able to receive all this information, but sometimes it is just too much.
Social media provides us with so many details, facts, and opinions that we are unable to understand immediately but are pressured to do so anyway. There is this urgency to respond quickly because as sudden as these trending topics rise, they can easily be replaced by something new. However, this trend toward efficiency has failed to take into account the importance of quality.
We are rushed into making decisions and opinions based on limited knowledge or we risk being irrelevant. Even worse, we are forced to fit our thoughts into an alluring message spanning a few characters because, let’s face it, once you finish that well-researched essay-long message, your group chat has already moved on to a different topic.
They say to live in the moment, but the constant updates have us looking too much on today that we forget about tomorrow. We participate in multiple conversations at the same time and lose the opportunity to develop meaningful relationships. In order to survive this endless stream of knowledge, we tend to mechanically partake in discourse like a machine using an algorithm.
Although the rate of information flow shows no signs of slowing down, maybe we should learn to take a step back and, in the words of Socrates, “know that [we] know nothing.” Maybe the only way to reconnect with ourselves, society, and the world, is to start minimizing web noise, turning off notifications, and ultimately disconnecting.
