Because the Internet has provided a way for millions of people to self-publish, the amount of information available has become astronomical in a matter of a few years. I don’t think this is a surprise to anyone who is at least casually acquainted with the Web.

The Bursting Dam and the Flood

We wonder why our users’—and our own—attention spans have shriveled, why our audiences won’t read the manual or help. I think it has a lot to do with what I’ll call the “information deluge.”

Think of how many ways we have to get the loads of information on the Web:

  • RSS feeds
  • Twitter
  • Browsing
  • Search engines
  • Email
  • Listservs
  • Online newsletters
  • Forums
  • Chat
  • Others I haven’t thought of

So much information is out there to be ingested and digested that we can’t possibly do it all. But we want to get a lot of it. Even when we’re not voluntarily looking for a bit of information, we can still be pummeled with it (such as flashing sidebar ads). Advertisers and others are trying to get our attention all the time.

It’s a constant battle for me in this arena. I want to be in touch with what’s going on in my profession, but then I don’t check my RSS feeds for a few days for various reasons, and suddenly I’m up over 100 unread items. I try to keep my list of people I follow on Twitter relatively low so as to keep the stream at a decent rate, but I still add people sometimes. The potential to be drowned in the flood is real. Or at least for there to be enough water that it washes over the plain and none sinks in to nourish the soil.

This is like a dam that has multiple holes in it. Water is streaming into the plain below, and the reservoir is only filling up more and more, threatening to become an overwhelming flood.

The Aftermath

With so many stimuli, I believe that the newest generations among us have brains that have learned early to skip from message to message to message. Later generations may be going down this path as well. It has become undesirable for many people to dwell on one thing for very long because there’s always something else they can be ingesting and digesting. And with so much information in competition and so many things that are worth ingesting, we have to prioritize. The innumerable choices force us to pick and choose. As a result, only the very best things get our attention. Or so we hope.

This competition for attention leads to devices that do succeed in getting our attention—at least for a second. Our time has been called the Age of Distraction, an apt term. Cory Doctorow wrote in Locus Magazine about how being distracted can prevent you from writing effectively. The article discusses how to stay focused on writing when a thousand distractions constantly beckon.

However, I’m thinking more about writing for people who are subject to distraction—and I’m not talking about just people with ADD. I’m talking about everyone.

Rather than ramble on, though, I’ll think more about it and follow up with another post.

No related posts.