Fighting Information Overload
A neat little fact recently popped up on my social media feed.
“The average person today receives more information on a daily basis than the average person received in a lifetime in 1900,” said the tweet. (Presumably, meaning the average person across their lifetime from 1800 to 1900.)
This claim not only seemed intuitively true, but essential to my life at that moment. at the end of a long morning spent on Facebook and Twitter, engaging with information on a whole manner of contentious global issues, I felt compelled, by the weight of my frustration and mental exhaustion, to retweet it.
How do we, as humans exposed to a constant barrage of information at all times, seek to process and interpret information overload as the imposition of that overload grows exponentially? Particularly in the era of half-truths and “fake news,” where blogs masquerade as legitimate journalistic entities, the ability to categorize and interpret data has become — in proportion to the sheer mass of information we’re exposed to on a constant basis — a massively valuable skill.
As I often do when something of apparent value piques my interest, I clicked through to the comments section on this tweet. Many influencers, entrepreneurs, and dedicated professionals were busy discussing the truths and implications behind that breathtaking-though-unsurprising idea: that we’re exposed on a daily basis to more information today than the average person was exposed to during their entire lives in 1900.
It was only then that I thought to look at the source.
The tweet came from Craig Shapiro, the “founder and managing partner of @collabfund.” A quick Google search told me that the “Collaborative Fund is a venture capital firm focused on providing seed and early stage funding to technology companies.”
This tweet popped up in my social media feed after it was reshared by a tech journalist whom I’ve worked with briefly in the past. Given the relevant and seemingly self-evident nature of the claim, and with the added confirmation bias from being shared by someone within my extended social circle, I accepted it at face value. Not only that: I amplified the claim, and actually made a conscious effort to incorporate this idea — that I’m exposed to a constant barrage of information utterly unheard of by the average person throughout their life in 1900 — into my framework of understanding and engaging with the world. I made a mental note that I should really go camping soon and allow my brain to decompress.
At this point, though, something started to seem a bit off. I clicked through to the article linked in the tweet. It was a blog post from the Collaborative Fund, with the bold takeaway about information overload mentioned (and sourced!) in the very first paragraph.
Having past experience in digital marketing, I know bloggers will often pack mostly meaningless content into narrative form in order to promote the services of whichever company they’re writing for. Relevant and highly shareable bits of information are social currency, and in the world of digital marketing, capturing a wide audience by establishing a loose narrative around a relatable bit of info is critical to drawing web traffic. Anyway, I was interested in the claim itself — so I clicked through to the hyperlink that said “source.”
The linked source was a blog post by Donald E. Wetmore, a “successful full time Professional Public Speaker” [sic] and “President of the Productivity Institute, a seminar company in Stratford, CT,” who drafted this list of what he calls “time management facts and figures.” The claim that “the average person today receives more information on a daily basis than the average person in a lifetime in 1900” is embedded among a list of several dozen seemingly ill-supported factoids, such as “95% of divorces are caused by a lack of communication,” “9 out of 10 people daydream in meetings,” and “’stressed’ spelled backwards is ‘desserts’.”
None of these factoids — or apparently untrue claims presented as facts — are themselves sourced. The blog’s author notes that they were made from observations taken “during the last 20 years, after making over 2,000 presentations around the world.”
The kicker? The original claim I so earnestly reshared, the one which was exposed to me by virtue of the corporate blog of a tech-related venture capital firm, is outdated to begin with. The tweet neglected to mention that this list of factoids was written nearly two decades ago, all the way back in 1999.
Perhaps we are exposed to more information today than the average person was exposed to throughout their entire lives in 1900. But if this is true, then the need to verify and contextualize the information presented to us has become more critical a skill than ever.
