Ask Slashdot: How Do You Avoid 'Information Overload' (wikipedia.org)

As we approach a holiday weekend and a brand new year, do we need to start carving out more time away from the internet? "I'm convinced the Internet (as in Slashdot) is making many people more lonely (and duller), not better," writes long-time Slashdot reader shanen: I think the best description of the problem I've read is The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing To Our Brains by Nicholas Carr. Not exactly his formulation, but in brief I would say that too much information is overwhelming us...

Some approaches towards solutions appear in The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli (based on the German Die Kunst des klaren Denkens : 52 Denkfehler, die Sie besser anderen uberlassen. Again, better references would be greatly appreciated, especially as regards the problem of disaster porn overwhelming journalism.
New Media professor Clay Shirky has argued that "it's not information overload, it's filter failure." And Carr's original question was actually "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" though he still warned of the possibility that "the crazy quilt of Internet media" is remapping the neural circuitry in our brains. (And that "as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens.") The original submitter asked the question another way -- "Is deep thought possible in the Internet Age?" But it'd be interesting to hear what strategies are being used by Slashdot readers.

Leave your best answers in the comments. How do you avoid information overload?

Comments

Turn off the phone, put it in a room you're not in

[TigerPlish]

Seriously. Turn off the phone and put it in a room you're not in. Then, step away from the computer (PC, tablets, laptops, whatever you use.)

Now, go do other things you've forgotten how to do.

The internet is not making people dumber...

[blahplusplus]

... it is exposing how shallow and stupid humanity always was. The reality is we live in a dystopian idiocracy. The reason the world is so corrupt is because the vast majority of the public falls for the lies of the rich and powerful and their corporations and vote against their own interests. That's reality.

We're not overload with information;

[hey!]

we're overloaded with data.

There isn't a precise semantic distinction between these two terms, and they're often used interchangeably. That leads to confusing terms like "information overload".

But if you think about information as that aspect of data or its context that makes us informed, and we instead call the phenomenon we're talking about "data overload", then things become a lot clearer. What we're talking about is a form of incapacitation, but this is exactly the opposite of becoming informed, which is a kind of empowerment. The experience of becoming informed is one of surprise; it makes you sit up and feel alert.

So the answer is to be both more selective about information and more broad-minded about it at the same time. Absorbing data which simply reinforces what you already know is mind-numbing. Seek data which puts the data you already have in context, or shows it in a new light. That's what I mean by being more selective (stop mindlessly consuming the same old stuff) and more open-minded (seek out data that challenges your preconceptions and takes you out of your rut).

Also, beware data that is packaged to be easy to consume mindlessly. It's junk food data. You need more intellectual roughage, something that takes time and effort to chew.