Why We Don't Care About Information Overload
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.
Tom Davenport, who holds the President's Chair in Information Technology and Management at Babson College, articulates in a post to the Harvard Business Publishing blog exactly what I've been trying to say for years: Information overload and the so-called "attention crash" are a lot of hogwash.
Davenport -- who co-wrote "Working Knowledge," the best book I ever read on knowledge management -- lists three reasons to dismiss the whole overload/crash meme. First, we keep hoping to find something new and exciting (and we often do). Second, it's just not so serious that it's worth expending any particular effort. And third, we don't assign enough value to our own attention (or else we wouldn't open junk mail delivered by the post office).
I'll add one: If something really is overload -- if we honestly don't care about it at all -- we'll ignore it.
Davenport concludes his post with these wise words:
The next time you hear someone talking or read someone writing about information overload, save your own attention and tune that person out. Nobody's ever going to do anything about this so-called problem, so don't overload your own brain by wrestling with the issue.
Amen, brother.
