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

Information overload? No, entertainment overload

[Kjella]

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 don't have any problem with the Internet being full of information, I find it's great. Even if parts of it are full of crackpots you can find tons of useful posts if you're willing to go outside the echo chambers. No, what's killing "everything else" is that there's so much entertainment, even if Sturgeon's law that says 90% of everything is crap I have the feeling the total is growing and growing. Here's a good TV series, there's a good movie, this was a cool game and I feel like I have a "backlog" of things that would be fun but that didn't make the cut. Heck, I have a bunch of things that I'd kinda like to watch a second time which gets constantly pre-empted by something new.

I don't think it's that I've gotten less picky. Maybe it's that I had more time, but that still doesn't explain everything. I feel like things were different before like before WoW etc. where you couldn't get so addicted to a game you'd basically disappear into the computer. Not that I actually played WoW, I knew I had the tendencies from other games and that would be like shooting heroin. But damn, they're good at making things addictive. And this new trend of releasing a whole season at once hasn't helped me, it's like an invitation to binge watching. If I had a week's cool down maybe I'd stop and think it wasn't that great instead of getting caught up in what happens next. And the smartphone killed the remaining zone-out time.