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How To Focus: Five Historical Inventions to Curb Information Overload
Ubiquitous smartphones that provide always-on Internet access create unprecedented information overload. First, there are the non-stop interruptions from WhatsApp, SMS, and social media notifications. And that’s just at home! Business apps overpower us during worktime, as well. A recent survey commissioned by OpenText found ¼ of US workers use 11 or more business apps every day, and 47% of workers spend an hour or more searching for information… presumably because it is spread across so many apps and content repositories.
Every new message, meme, and video we receive fills our already-exploding skulls with one more bit of information to process and hopefully… remember. It’s no wonder that 80% of survey respondents say they experience information overload.
With an unprecedented amount of information to process, it’s natural to think that we are experiencing overload as never seen before in history. But that’s simply not true. Because with the advent of new information technologies throughout history, people were overwhelmed each time anew, with more information than they could process. Consider the following two examples.
The Age of Print
In 1400, almost nobody had ever seen a book. Yet within 100 years, more books were printed than had been…
