Information Overload Quotes

“There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Sometimes a pessimist is only an optimist with extra information.”
― Idries Shah, Reflections

“In the age of technology there is constant access to vast amounts of information. The basket overflows; people get overwhelmed; the eye of the storm is not so much what goes on in the world, it is the confusion of how to think, feel, digest, and react to what goes on.”
― Criss Jami, Venus in Arms

“...a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention...”
― Herbert A. Simon

“We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture—and, in the process, we don’t allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds.”
― Alain de Botton

“distringit librorum multitudo

(the abundance of books is distraction)”
― Seneca

“In the Information Age, the first step to sanity is FILTERING. Filter the information: extract for knowledge.

Filter first for substance. Filter second for significance. These filters protect against advertising.

Filter third for reliability. This filter protects against politicians.

Filter fourth for completeness. This filter protects against the media.”
― Marc Stiegler, David's Sling

“People today are in danger of drowning in information; but, because they have been taught that information is useful, they are more willing to drown than they need be.

If they could handle information, they would not have to drown at all.”
― Idries Shah, Reflections

“Information overload is a symptom of our desire to not focus on what's important. It is a choice.”
― Brian Solis

“But if we define the Megaphone as the composite of the hundreds of voices we hear each day that come to us from people we don't know, via high-tech sources, it's clear that a significant and ascendant component of that voice has become bottom-dwelling, shrill, incurious, ranting, and agenda-driven. It strives to antagonize us, make us feel anxious, ineffective, and alone; convince us that the world is full of enemies and of people stupider and less agreeable than ourselves; is dedicated to the idea that, outside the sphere of our immediate experience, the world works in a different, more hostile, less knowable manner. This braindead tendency is viral and manifests intermittently; while it is the blood in the veins of some of our media figures, it flickers on and off in others.”
― George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone

“[T]he problem was too much information. The population was being inundated with conflicting versions of increasingly complex events. People were giving up on understanding anything. The glut of information was dulling awareness, not aiding it. Overload. It encouraged passivity, not involvement.”
― Jerry Mander, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television

“Information, misinformation, disinformation, and data: We might not know what to call it, but we certainly are drowning in it.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume I - Reframing and Navigating Disruption

“Thus the media are producers not of socialization, but of exactly the opposite, of the implosion of the social in the masses. And this is only the macroscopic extension of the implosion of meaning at the microscopic level of the sign. This implosion should be analyzed according to McLuhan’s formula, the medium is the message, the consequences of which have yet to be exhausted.

This means that all contents of meaning are absorbed in the only dominant form of the medium. Only the medium can make an event—whatever the contents, whether they are conformist or subversive. A serious problem for all counterinformation, pirate radios, antimedia, etc. But there is something even more serious, which McLuhan himself did not see. Because beyond this neutralization of all content, one could still expect to manipulate the medium in its form and to transform the real by using the impact of the medium as form. If all the content is wiped out, there is perhaps still a subversive, revolutionary use value of the medium as such. That is—and this is where McLuhan’s formula leads, pushed to its limit—there is not only an implosion of the message in the medium, there is, in the same movement, the implosion of the medium itself in the real, the implosion of the medium and of the real in a sort of hyperreal nebula, in which even the definition and distinct action of the medium can no longer be determined.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

“They think they are interested about the atomic bomb but they really are not not any more than I am. Really not. They may be a little scared, I am not so scared, there is so much to be scared of so what is the use of bothering to be scared, and if you are not scared the atomic bomb is not interesting.

Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense. They listen so much that they forget to be natural. This is a nice story.”
― Gertrude Stein, Reflection on the Atomic Bomb

“The only difference between being uninformed and misinformed is that one is your choice and the other is theirs.”
― Frank Sonnenberg, Listen to Your Conscience: That's Why You Have One

“Are you filling your head with empty calories?”
― Frank Sonnenberg, Soul Food: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life

“There is no such thing as social media, there is only unsocial media.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Karadeniz Chronicle: The Novel

“Am I oversimplifying here? Yes. Is all our media stupid? Far from it. Were intelligent, valuable things written about the rush to war (and about O.J. and Monica, and then Laci Peterson and Michael Jackson, et al.)? Of course.

But: Is some of our media very stupid? Hoo boy. Does stupid, near-omnipresent media make us more tolerant toward stupidity in general? It would be surprising if it didn’t.

Is human nature such that, under certain conditions, stupidity can come to dominate, infecting the brighter quadrants, dragging everybody down with it?”
― George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone

“How often does it occur that information provided you on morning radio or television, or in the morning newspaper, causes you to alter your plans for the day, or to take some action you would not otherwise have taken, or provides insight into some problem you are required to solve? For most of us, news of the weather will sometimes have such consequences; for investors, news of the stock market; perhaps an occasional story about a crime will do it, if by chance the crime occurred near where you live or involved someone you know. But most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action. This fact is the principal legacy of the telegraph: By generating an abundance of irrelevant information, it dramatically altered what may be called the "information-action" ratio.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“When information overload strikes again, I reach for a mantra: Knowledge is power. Applied knowledge is powerful.”
― Vindy Teja

“In this age of information abundance and overload, those who get ahead will be the folks who figure out what to leave out so they can concentrate on what's really important to them. Nothing is more paralyzing than the idea of limitless possibilities. The idea that you can do anything is absolutely terrifying.”
― Austin Kleon, The Steal Like an Artist Audio Trilogy

“Now, why aggressive, anxiety-provoking, maudlin, polarizing discourse should prove more profitable than its opposite is a mystery. Maybe it's a simple matter of drama: ranting, innuendo, wallowing in the squalid, the exasperation of the already-convinced, may, at some crude level, just be more interesting than some intelligent, skeptical human being trying to come to grips with complexity, especially given the way we use our media: as a time-killer in the airport, a sedative or stimulant at the end of a long day.”
― George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone

“The instinctual shortcut that we take when we have "too much information" is to engage with it selectively, picking out the parts we like and ignoring the remainder, making allies with those who have made the same choices and enemies of the rest.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don't

“So what do we talk about. We talk about the movies which of course is what everyone talks about, although again, he likes movies in which things happen and I like those in which things don’t. Who wants anything to happen and I think this more and more; there is too much happening all over anyhow and what we need to do is slow things down.”
― Martha Ronk, Glass Grapes and Other Stories

“we are the generation surviving with overloaded information, we have access to all the love songs in the world, to the stories of love, poetry on hate, articles on relationships - they are all just a button away but, we are the generation humiliating love.”
― Jyoti Patel

“The worst-case scenario might be: Information arrives in the form of prose written by a person with little or no firsthand experience in the subject area, who hasn't had much time to revise what he's written, working within narrow time constraints, in the service of an agenda that may be subtly or overtly distorting his ability to tell the truth.

Could we make this scenario even worse? Sure. Let it be understood that the Informant's main job is to entertain and that, if he fails in this, he's gone. Also, the man being informed? Make him too busy, ill-prepared, and distracted to properly assess what the Informant's shouting at him.

...

Welcome to America, circa 2003.”
― George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone

“The rapid accumulation of knowledge has spawned a sense of urgency to master information quickly, perhaps at the expense of building foundational understanding needed for future learning. Quality remains elusive. More and faster have become mistakenly synonymous with better.”
― Susan Dunn, Design Technology: Children's Engineering

“Extensive information is highly distracting.”
― HUMAIRA SYED, 55 Habits for Mindset Mastery: A Perfect Collection of Everyday Simple HABITS to Change Your Life Forever

“To an increasing degree, politics will be about demands for something to sense. The demand will no longer be for clothes, food, and housing. We also want bits! The uprisings of the future will be under slogans such as Senses Make Sense! Make Sense of the World! Common Sense
Belongs to Everybody!”
― Tor Nørretranders, The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size

“We live in strange times, being bombarded with information 24/7, having a hard time to distinguish between reality and hyperreality, between what is fake and what is real. I guess having strange dreams might be the most normal thing we can experience nowadays. As paradoxically as that sounds”
― Ryan Gelpke, Peruvian Nights