When I grew up, we struggled to get information, now we get inundated with information from everywhere. The biggest problem is determining if we’re getting quality information.
With the Online world, anybody can say just about anything they want, and they get it wrong quite a bit of the time, but on the other hand, with social media avenues such as Twitter, some of the instant information comes in faster and better than what the media will report, as in the case with Twitter where earth quakes are often reported by people who just be feel can predict the force of the quake faster than the media can and with more accuracy.
Still, we have to ask ourselves if were absorbing too much unneeded information just because it’s there, or we feel obligated to take it in because we might miss something.
I take my smart phone everywhere I go and am constantly checking my email until recently when I’ve finally started to put it down, but I have to ask myself, do I really need to know instantly what’s coming into my inbox?
The answer is a simple no! In fact, I should be able to ignore my inbox for days at a time. While I’m at it, I’m starting to leave my phone in the car as there is nothing that critical that I need to respond to and instead I’m using the time to focus more on my family and friends.
While I’ve got a long way to go, I’m in the process of lighting my information diet. We all need to lighten our information diet, but few of us will. Instead, many of us are going to try to find ways to increase the information coming in, which will only serve to cloud everything else even more.
When do we realize we have too much information coming in? Wait, I better be careful or our government will identify this as something else that they need to regulate to help us have a better quality of life.