“Information overload” has been in our vocabulary for decades–we can all relate to the frustration of receiving 100+ emails a day and not having enough time to process all the information that comes at us. We joke about it.
Philosopher Daniel Dennett offers a disturbing new view on this problem: we are being overrun by memes (self-replicating ideas such as common knowledge, song melodies, beliefs) — and the outlook is grim.
Dennett writes in the Edge Annual Question 2006:
The human population is still growing, but at nowhere near the rate that the population of memes is growing. There is competition for the limited space in human brains for memes, and something has to give.
Thanks to our incessant and often technically brilliant efforts, and our apparently insatiable appetites for novelty, we have created an explosively growing flood of information, in all media, on all topics, in every genre. Now either (1) we will drown in this flood of information, or (2) we won’t drown in it. Both alternatives are deeply disturbing.
What do I mean by drowning? I mean that we will become psychologically overwhelmed, unable to cope, victimized by the glut and unable to make life-enhancing decisions in the face of an unimaginable surfeit. [...]
If we don’t drown, how will we cope? [...] What will happen to common knowledge in the future? I do think our ancestors had it easy: aside from all the juicy bits of unshared gossip and some proprietary trade secrets and the like, people all knew pretty much the same things, and knew that they knew the same things. There just wasn’t that much to know. Won’t people be able to create and exploit illusions of common knowledge in the future, virtual worlds in which people only think they are in touch with their cyber-neighbors?
Imagine a world in which the aspects of culture that tie us together–music, traditions, art, philosophy, science–have become so tremendously diluted that we lose that common thread. It would be like “culture shock,” but for everyone in the culture.
On a more applied (and less depressing) note, the role of information designers/information architects/whatever they are called is likely to grow as our constant flow of information grows. People will become more dependent on tools that filter information (witness the dominance of Google and Yahoo!) rather than tools that collect data–and a clean, usable interface will of course still be critical to any data filtering program.
