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#informationoverload

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Harmony Seeker

You’re not imagining it—life is more overwhelming than it used to be.

Thirty years ago, we weren’t expected to be on 24/7.
Now, everything—news, work, education, friendship—flows through endless digital networks.

We scroll, refresh, reply, react.
There’s no pause. No buffer. No off-switch.

This is the Network Society.
Power no longer moves top-down—it moves through likes, clicks, and notifications.
Your attention is the commodity. Your nervous system is the casualty.

We weren’t built for this.
We evolved for rhythm, rest, and relationship—not for a life spent staring into the infinite scroll.

If you’re feeling scattered, anxious, or emotionally fried—you’re not broken.
You’re living in a system that rewards saturation over sanity.

Maybe the first step is naming it.
This isn’t just burnout. It’s digital trauma.

#DigitalFatigue#NetworkSociety#DigitalWellbeing
Stefano Marinelli

In recent days, I’ve observed and talked to some people.

Some responses made me reflect: "I tried Mastodon, but I didn’t know whom to follow. No system gave me targeted suggestions, and I felt lost and abandoned it."

"Purchases? Mostly online. Sometimes I don’t know what to buy, and targeted advertising suggestions help me."

"I get my information online, especially from social media. I receive all the news that interests me, while official sites are full of things I have no interest in."

One of the problems in today’s society is that people, bombarded by the sheer amount of information available, feel lost. Algorithms help them choose, decide, and orient themselves, but the issue is that if these algorithms are not calibrated positively but solely in an interested manner, the result is to produce individuals incapable of making informed decisions, conditioned exclusively by what is suggested, stated, and amplified.

It’s as if, after years of guided information, many people believe they are always right (the "famous" bubble), feel entitled to everything (advertisements), and perceive the world as hostile (conspiracy theories, etc.).

Artificial intelligence has now become another example of this system: I know people who can no longer do anything without it. They try to impose me (incorrect) IT sysadmin solutions me because "the AI said so."

At this rate, I fear the most atrophied part of our body will be our brains.

#Mastodon#SocialMedia#InformationOverload
Doc Edward Morbius ⭕​

@jec Yes, this is very much what I'm getting at.

There are some Mastodon tools you can use, more on that in a follow-up.

On the concept itself, earlier writings:

Cheap Rejection as a Feature

Builds the idea that cheap and fast no-gregats information rejection is a feature in an information-rich world:

[M]ental models are not simply modeling devices, but information rejection tools. Borrowing from Clay Shirkey’s “It’s not information overload, it’s filter failure”, the world is a surprisingly information-rich space, and humans (or any other information-processing system, biological or otherwise) simply aren’t equipped to deal with more than a minuscule fraction of it. We aim for a useful fraction. It paints an incomplete, but useful picture.

Even a bad model has utility if it rejects information cheaply.

<diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/

Refutation of Metcalfe's Law revisited: network effects meet Sturgeon's Law
old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/c

On bullshit, S/N, craft, respect, and originality
old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/c

diaspora.glasswings.comCheap Rejection as a FeatureCheap Rejection as a Feature I’m increasingly convinced that worldviews / mental models are not simply modeling devices, but information rejection tools. Borrowing from Clay Shirkey's "It's not information overload, it's filter failure", the world is a surprisingly information-rich space, and humans (or any other information-processing system, biological or otherwise) simply aren't equipped to deal with more than a minuscule fraction of it. We aim for a useful fraction. It paints an incomplete, but useful picture. Even a bad model has utility if it rejects information cheaply: without conscious effort, without physical effort, and without lingering concerns or apprehensions. It's a no-FOMO mechanism. Usually, what happens is that we apply our bad models to a given scenario, act, process the new resulting scenario, and notice that that is obviously not favourable, and take appropriate actions to correct the new circumstance. Net loss: one round of interaction. Net gain: not su...
#SignalNoise#Information#InformationOverload
Replied in thread
Doc Edward Morbius ⭕​

@vortex_egg
One cheat approach to this I have is to go through the HN daily archive, where HN is a decent prefilter. Often there's a small set of the top 30 (or up to ~100) daily items which are worth a closer look. I'll read a few days behind.

On Reddit, if you've got a good subreddit, you can set a date range (day, week, month, year) and then sort by "top" to get the most highly-rated items in that period. Reddit tends not to do a great job of quality selection, but it's not completely worthless.

The third of my two tricks is to just rely on random selection to an extent. If you've got too much material to make an informed choice on, shuffle your deck and select something at random. You'll miss some stuff, yes, but you're making an unbiased rather than a biased selection. You can also apply other filters to noise sources.

#Research #ResearchMethods #LiteratureSearch #InformationOverload #CalNewport #DavidAllen #GettingThingsDone #DeepWork #Zettlekasten #BOTI

3/end/

Replied in thread
Doc Edward Morbius ⭕​

@vortex_egg There are two techniques in particular I'd like to suggest which ... well, they don't fully work but they seem to help:

1) Time block your information-gathering phase. Whether that's on a daily or weekly ongoing basis, or as a project phase, say "I'll scan Twitter for X minutes per day, only". And do that at the end of the day, when you've taken care of high-relevance/payoff tasks first.

2) What I call #BOTI: "Best of the Interval". On a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual ... basis, review the items you've selected as noteworthy from that period as well as the top items from the next smaller intervals, and select some n number of best items. You'll probably find that a good value is 10 <= n <= 100, but do what works for you.

BOTI draws on the 43 folders / tickler file concept, or the round-robin database. Essentially you're determining that no matter how long your research goes on, you're committing to a finite set of retained data.

(This is used in all kinds of IT systems and network monitoring, especially with long-term data history.)

You end up with higher resolution in recent / near periods, lower resolution as you go back in time. But you're constantly trying to filter up the best stuff. Since assessment can take time, you'll re-scan earlier selections to see if you'd missed something of relevance (and you can always break protocol for something especially good). But you've got a structure and have set limits on scope.

You'll also start to develop a sense with time as to what actually provides usefulness, and if you track sources, which of those are most valuable. Filter noise aggressively.

A source that sometimes generates signal but usually doesn't ... is virtually always noise. Signal tends to come through, eventually.

(This is related to my "block fuckwits" advice.)

#Zettlekasten #DeepWork #GettingThingsDone #DavidAllen #CalNewport #InformationOverload #LiteratureSearch #ResearchMethods #Research

2/

Replied in thread
Doc Edward Morbius ⭕​

@vortex_egg This is a core challenge and failure of any academic. (Or unaffiliated researcher.) I struggle with this constantly.

That was the subtext of this toot:
toot.cat/@dredmorbius/10693396

Cal Newport does a fair bit of writing on this, aimed at both academics and professionals. Deep Work is probably the best starting point.

A good academic programme (especially for re-entering / nontraditional students) should also address this. Talk to your advisor or department. That library-skills course you're taking is actually directly addressing this, or should (and I'd still reall like to see the course notes / outline / syllabus / readings).

David Allen's Getting Things Done is another good general time-management / goals-management guide.

Zettlekasten (or an equivalent notes-and-references-tracking system) is also very helpful.

#Research #ResearchMethods #LiteratureSearch #InformationOverload #CalNewport #DavidAllen #GettingThingsDone #DeepWork #Zettlekasten

1/

toot.catDoc Edward Morbius ⭕​ (@dredmorbius@toot.cat)By Doc Edward Morbius ⭕​
Doc Edward Morbius ⭕​

@mathew Hey, reading your Social Networks post here:
meta.ath0.com/2020/12/social-n

... on a B&W e-ink device. I was wondering why you'd not included a link to the University of Indiana study in question.

Turns out you did. But your colour scheme (and lack of underlining of links) makes the link impossible to find (I did go all stylus-stabby on the article hoping to hit something, w/o luck).

The article, FWIW (and For Future Me's Convenience: FFMC) is:

Information Overload Helps Fake News Spread, and Social Media Knows It (November, 2020)

scientificamerican.com/article

(This is why I increasingly prefer to 1) link to titles directly and 2) include Bare Ass Naked hyperlinks in posts/comments.)

Gripe aside, interesting post.

meta.ath0.comSocial networksIt's worse than you think
#FakeNews#InformationOverload#ScientificAmerican
Doc Edward Morbius ❌​

On catastrophes and confusion, 9/11:

> Commander Anthony Barnes: That first hour was mass confusion because there was so much erroneous information. It was hard to tell what was fact and what wasn’t. We couldn’t confirm much of this stuff, so we had to take it on face value until proven otherwise.

politico.com/magazine/story/20

From an oral history of 9/11, at the White House.

The first sign/early stage of disaster is confusion.

#catastrophes #confusion #signsOfTrouble #informationOverload

1/

www.politico.com‘We May Have to Shoot Down This Aircraft’What the chaos aboard Flight 93 on 9/11 looked like to the White House, to the fighter pilots prepared to ram the cockpit and to the passengers.
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