In a provocative and insightful interview with the Columbia Journalism Review, Internet guru Clay Shirky says that he’s had enough with people complaining that information overload is harming our society (em. below is mine):

Oh, those are the stupidest people in the entire debate [...] the information overload people are the most narcissistic [of all] because information overload started in Alexandria, in the library of Alexandria, right? That was the first example where we have concrete archaeological evidence that there was more information in one place than one human being could deal with in one lifetime, which is almost the definition of information overload. And the first deep attempt to categorize knowledge so that you could subset; the first take on the information filtering problem appears in the library of Alexandria.

By the time that the publishing industries spun up in Venice in the early -to mid-1500s, the ability to have access to more reading material than you could finish in a lifetime is now starting to become a general problem of the educated classes. And by the 1800s, it’s a general problem of the middle class. So there is no such thing as information overload, there’s only filter failure, right? Which is to say the normal case of modern life is information overload for all educated members of society.

[...] The reason we think that there’s not an information overload problem in a Barnes and Noble or a library is that we’re actually used to the cataloging system. On the Web, we’re just not used to the filters yet, and so it seems like “Oh, there’s so much more information.” But, in fact, from the 1500s on, that’s been the normal case.

This put me in a bit of a reflective mood. Shirky is right at the societal level, of course, but information overload can be a real problem at the individual level.

I’ve been grappling with information overload for years now, both from a time management and psychological perspective. There’s seemingly infinite breadth of high-quality books, magazine articles, and Websites to read, and there’s simply no possible way that a human being can read them all. And with the neverending torrent of new content that technology now streams at us—via email once upon a time, through RSS nowadays—it’s natural to wind up feeling helpless at times. How am I supposed to keep up?

The answer, of course, is that I can’t. Part of the deep wisdom of David Allen’s Getting Things Done is the insight that stress is a subconscious reaction to our unkept agreements with ourselves. If we find ourselves continually stressed about something—as I sometimes do, at my inability to keep up with All Quality Content Everywhere—then we have to renegotiate our commitments.

Allen’s Zen-like insight buried itself into my head, but it took a couple months for me to absorb and apply it to the concept of information overload (I’m slow like that, sometimes) (OK, oftentimes). But it was an incredibly freeing moment when I finally just admitted to myself “you know what? There is going to be lots of amazing material that I will simply never get to. It’ll exist somewhere out there, in the ether, without my absorption; in most cases I will never even know about it. And that’s OK!”

It’s absurd how relieved I felt, just making this simple and obvious admission to myself. But it helped, and I began the slow and painful process of paring back my “to read” list,¹ and learning to sometimes just let content fly by me untouched.

There’s still some guilt when admitting that I will never read certain books, but at least I’m admitting it now. And I still waste way too much time reading endlessly recursive links, but there are fewer of them now, and I’ve begun to get a handle on it from a time-management perspective.² Absolutely no more “to read later” bookmarks, either. I’ll open something in a new tab and, if I haven’t gotten to the tab in due course, I’ll ruthlessly close it.³

So here’s to hoping that the filters continue to improve, and that our individual cognition systems match pace correspondingly. Or that the robot servants arrive soon to help us out.

1. Largely comprised of the links under “Blogroll,” in the navbar on the right side of this page. [↩]
2. This has been especially helpful with battling the mildly obsessive-compulsive need to read—or at least scroll past—everything on, say, a news site like TechCrunch, especially after I’ve missed several days. The time wasted getting “caught up” just isn’t worth it. If an amazing news story broke during the time I missed, or if a brilliant and groundbreaking new insight was published, I can rest assured that I’ll eventually hear about it again. [↩]
3. Well, OK, not very ruthlessly. I’m still far from being an information ninja. I’ll often keep tabs open for weeks or even months before finally reading them, which is a pretty bad habit when it’s more than a few (and it is). But I’m getting a little bit better every day! [↩]