Kathleen Parker's column yesterday was about how we're exposed to too much information. In it, she notes that "the world produced 161 exabytes (an exabyte is 1 quintillion bytes) of digital data" in 2006. "[T]hat's 3 million times the information contained in all the books ever written. By next year, the number is expected to reach 988 exabytes [emphasis mine]."
This is, of course, truly astonishing. I tend to believe that humans are pretty adaptable - impressively capable of parsing the constant barrage of information - but information overload has been shown to...well...make us dumber. Parker continues:
[...] brain research shows that we do our best thinking when we're not engaged and focused, yet fewer of us have time for downtime. (If you have to schedule relaxation, is it still relaxing?)
Daydreaming, we used to call it. Ask any creative person where they got their best ideas and they'll say, "Dunno. Just came to me out of the blue." If you're looking for Eureka -- as in the Aha! moment -- you probably won't find it while following David Gregory's Tweets. Or checking Facebook to see who might be "friending" whom. Or whose status has been updated. George Orwell is . . . More likely, the ideas that save the world will present themselves in the shower or while we're sweeping the front stoop. What the world needs now isn't more, but less. The alternative to mindless activities for the mindful is turning out to be not a less-informed nation but a dumber one.
Unchecked "infomania" -- yes, there's even a term for this instapathology -- can lead to a lower IQ, according to a 2005 Hewlett-Packard study. The research, conducted by a University of London psychologist, found that people distracted by e-mail and phone calls lost 10 IQ points, more than twice the impact of smoking marijuana -- or comparable to losing a night's sleep.
I certainly don't want my IQ to drop 10 points. So, what are your thoughts on this? Are we exposed to too much information? Clearly there is an astonishing amount of it out there, but is that necessarily bad? Can we, if we choose, ignore the plethora of needless information while still being able to quickly summon that which is useful? What does this mean for future generations more dependent on this network of knowledge?
