Ten years ago David Shenk published Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut Revised and Updated Edition
[W]hile doing research in Washington into public political knowledge, I started to realize that our postindustrial society was in the midst of a true phase shift—from information scarcity to information glut. Even for a culture with a basic faith in human progress and technology, such a transformation clearly presented serious personal and political challenges. In Data Smog, I tried to suss out the most glaring potholes and suggest a few useful detours. "Something marvelous has been happening to humankind," I wrote in the book's preface. "Information is moving faster and becoming more plentiful, and people everywhere are benefiting from this change. But there's a surprising postscript to this story. When it comes to information, it turns out that one can have too much of a good thing."
Rereading the book 10 years later has been gratifying and humbling. A number of its ideas are, I think, more relevant than ever, while other passages come off as exaggerated or shortsighted. The premise still holds, and thankfully no longer requires much convincing: In our work, home, and social lives, we are saturated with data and stimulus. While our grandparents were limited by access to information and speed of communication, we are restricted largely by our ability to wade through it all. As with calories, we must work constantly to whittle down, prioritize, and pick out the choice nutritional bits. If we don't monitor our information diets carefully, our cerebral lives quickly become bloated. Attention gets diverted (sometimes dangerously so); conversations and trains-of-thought interrupted; skepticism short-circuited; stillness and silence all but eliminated. Probably the greatest overall threat is that so many potentially meaningful experiences can easily be supplanted by merely thrilling experiences.
Link: Was I right about the dangers of the Internet in 1997?
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