An experiment in light expression

As ironical as it sounds, I found myself thinking more consciously about Information Overload (a term coined decades back by Alvin Toffler of the Third Wave, Future Shock variety of futurist books) while sifting through banal, repetitive, vanilla articles describing the phenomenon and suggestions on how to deal with it.
Most articles point to email, Powerpoint and other office productivity tools as the culprits . Whenever powerful tools land up in the hands of the human race, they tend to gravitate towards the tastes, preferences and behaviors of the lowest common denominator than the highest one. Consider the Internet - 50% of it still serves the free porn bandwagon and not surprisingly the Internet porn industry was an earlier adopter of Internet technologies than most national Governments. (with perhaps the exception of Singapore!). Along similar lines, email, Powerpoint, Word and other tools in the workplace ended up conveying too much redundant information, meta-information about information, and regurgitations about actions around the information. And this is when people actually did work. Most of the time folks were busy forwarding political caricatures,  YouTube videos, creating chartjunk on Powerpoints, checking over email if anyone wanted to catch a movie or appearing busy by having an email client and an Excel sheet open on their desktop. Lowest common denominator.
I offer here two social/human perspectives on information overload:

1. Jorge Luis Borges, the great Argentinian writer had a revealing (if fictional) story about what happened to the human race when we went from relying on the Spoken Word to relying on the Written Word. One of the lessons of the story was that in relying more on documenting and archiving and retaining information, the modern human race lost the meaning and essence of the original Words (Cap. emphasis mine). We went from Biblical and Vedic truisms to the random mission statement generators which every corporate citizen takes potshots at. Somewhere in the cognitive switch we made in considering the Spoken word as less important, we ended up in a trap of dead documents, email graveyards, and Powerpoint Hell. With the original intent and agency lost in transit.

2. What happens if you put a gun in a child’s hands? Well, you don’t! Most of the knowledge workers entering the information/experience economy of today have been fattened on a digital diet where multi-tasking is the form, and where the ability to surf the electronic waves while doing your Physics homework, getting Gmail alerts through your desktop gadget and searching for your soulmate on Myspace/Orkut is the norm. Young knowledge workers fully except to multi-task successfully in the workplace without for a moment realizing the serious attention deficits this digital diet has caused. Without the discipline and the perspective to handle multiple concerns with dexterity, most knowledge workers drift from area to area (email to email to Word to Powerpoint to email), doing little justice to any of the individual tasks.

One of my resolutions for 2008 is to be aware of where i find myself drowning and use simple tools (to detoxify - no less!) for managing information overload. For today, here is one simple illustration I thought I’d share:

(courtesy Ralph Perrine: http://www.ralphperrine.com/)

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