The Answer Is Not More Information

The consequence of our content-addicted culture is non-stop diversion from having to come to grips with the big questions of reality, of life. The American social scientist Herbert Simon wrote: “The wealth of information means a dearth of something else—a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvi... See more

When facts are few, persuading the ignorant is relatively easy. But information abundance, already characteristic of early modern societies, engenders a degree of skepticism: The more there is to know, the more likely we feel that truth is elusive. Information super-abundance, or the condition of “digital plenitude,” as media scholar Jay David Bolt... See more

Our society is desperately in need of a new paradigm in our relationship to information. The lens of scarcity, control, and pure consumption is no longer serving us. If we’re going to thrive in this new era, we need to transform information from a source of stress and uncertainty into a source of creativity and abundance. We need to learn how to su... See more

And, in an act of very human selfishness, I have a tendency to type the names of these half-strangers into my search bar and hit return, an anti-social urge to answer the very human question: What happened? One of the great intimacies of the internet is the ability to ask the questions which would be too inappropriate or too rude or too personal to... See more

In the past the problem may have been ‘too little information’ and transparency, today it is ‘too much information’ — the excess noise and misinformation we ingest daily. And while we have exponential growth in technology and communication, we also have exponential possibilities of self-deception and bullshit.