Information Overload: How the Age of Knowing Everything Is Making Us Understand Less

On Information Overconsumption & Counteracting It

Photo by Luis Villasmil on Unsplash

Our current era is defined by access to information. Never before in human history has anyone been able to obtain the sheer volume of media we have access to at our fingertips.

When the internet was created, and a host of devices were made to more regularly access it, we were suddenly able to find information at unprecedented speeds. It’s liberating to be able to find almost anything and everything at any time.

When social media and algorithm-led feeds entered the scene, the speed at which we could obtain information skyrocketed. Suddenly, all that information wasn’t only accessible, it was streamlined for our viewing pleasure, ultra-processed into funny images and sound bites that go down easy and are digested through us just as quickly.

With the amount of available information now, particularly about concepts that we deem are important, consuming as much information as we can feels like staying informed. To know feels noble when we look back at human history and see generations of people who had no way of knowing better.

But with that comes pressure to be aware of it all: the inequities and risks and budget cuts and disasters and war developments, the things we should be angry about and the things we should be fighting for, who we should boycott, and everyone’s opinion about all of it. With that much pressure, it’s only reasonable that so many of us look to short-form summaries and AI overviews.

But we must remember that quantity of information is no substitute for depth, and simplified information leaves out oft-needed nuance. Where a high quantity can feel debilitating, depth of understanding from just one angle can feel motivating. And the abstracts can leave out important details.

Collectively, we are overconsuming information. It’s high time we adopt a more nutritious information diet.

How to Tell When We’re Overconsuming Information

The first step to improving our information nutrition is to identify where we’re at. How often are we spending our time scrolling on our phones? How do we behave on social media in times of crisis? How often are we engaging in parasocial behaviors? Understanding these patterns can help us identify whether our information habits are potentially associated with less than desirable symptoms.

Routinely spending our time overloading our brains with information can damage our ability to focus and remember. Compulsively multitasking with videos and stimuli can shock our system into not retaining what’s going on around us, and make it more difficult to pay attention when we need to. Overconsuming information can train our brains to expect a certain level of stimulus, resulting in weak concentration muscles. When we notice a gradual decrease in our ability to concentrate, fatigue from receiving new information, or newfound difficulty retrieving memories, overconsumption may be the culprit.

A gradual increase in anxiety and stress may also be a side effect of information overload. If we find an uptick in worry that seems correlated with the amount of time we’re spending on our phones or computers, that may be a sign that our current information habits need to be restructured. Granted, there’s a chance that we may turn to binging information to help alleviate anxiety, like when we hear about an awful disaster or terrible politics, but this pattern should still be considered when it occurs. At the very least, it’s still a good moment for introspection.

Should we reach the point of so much overload that our brains cannot fathom any more, it can lead to paralysis. Fatigue from information, particularly when we see facts and opinions in opposition to each other, can result in debilitating indecision. Depending on the situation and our mood, this sort of overwhelm can result in resignation, apathy, or extreme stress. If we find ourselves unable to make choices because of the amount we know, overconsumption might be part of our problem.

When we find ourselves in the vicious feedback loop of information overload, it can alter how well we are able to perceive the world. But it may also cause addiction. With pressure to stay “in-the-know” and burnout from trying, we can go so far into this loop as to harm ourselves by trying to hold onto it all. This loop, brought to its extreme, can result in troubling patterns.

But once we recognize how overload can individually affect us, it’s important to start wondering what impact that may have collectively.

Information Overconsumption & Its Impact on Society

When a society lives in a state of cognitive excess, this behavior might have significant consequences for us all. If a significant number of us are in a constant state of rush to cram as much information into our heads as we can, consider the nuance that we collectively might skim over. If we feel compelled to have an opinion on every single thing every government does, the actions of every influencer and celebrity, the carbon footprint of every action we do, and the potential health effects of every product in our cabinet, we’ll likely start rushing through what we consume just to have enough time for it.

In our current information climate, where headlines are sensationalized for clickbait and algorithms push emotional and extreme content, skimming and rushing can be dangerous. We’re seeing right now how dangerous that can become. Before we realize it, we might be digesting misinformation or glancing over important details that translate facts into falsehoods. And none of us are immune to that risk. Boiling down information to headlines and blurbs may be contributing to both polarization and outrage. Choosing width over depth makes for shallow opinions that are easy to be angry about, or easy to agree with, depending on how close they seem to fit with our opinions at first glance. Especially, if we’re only glancing at them.

Additionally, a society built on a foundation of normalized overconsumption of media is a society that doesn’t leave time for boredom. Being bored is an essential experience for boosting creativity, self-reflection, and processing what we experience and learn. When we collectively avoid this somewhat uncomfortable feeling by spending free moments consuming, we limit the capacity of our brains, never allowing them to steep in the information they receive. When boredom is uncommon in a community, we risk a decline in original thoughts and creative action from that community. Overconsumption can silence voices.

Counteracting Information Overload

Of course, we could avoid ever experiencing information overload with drastic measures like recycling our cell phones and never looking at social media again, but, for the vast majority of us, this approach isn’t realistic. Today, most of us need an online presence to facilitate connection or even make a living. We need more sustainable solutions than unplugging and tuning out forever. Much like the solution to overnutrition cannot be swearing off food forever, our solution to overconsuming information cannot be cutting out all information. A society underconsuming information is a whole other problem that deserves a separate article.

Instead, we must make an effort to curate what information we’re seeing and develop healthy habits around obtaining that information. To begin, it can make an impact by unfollowing junk content that pollutes our feeds. I’ve found it helpful to consider what content in my life feels like bloat. We can unsubscribe from accounts that fail to spark joy, unfollow creators that post too often, and remove ourselves from mailing lists that ping us with emails all day long.

Recently, I heard a brilliant strategy to improve screen use: turn off your applications’ non-essential notifications. Part of what keeps us on our tech, consuming varying qualities of information, is the number of notifications we’re bombarded with every time we look at it. When we open it up to check an important email, we also hear about a newly recommended TikTok, or a news article, or lives refilled on a game. This pelting of information from apps can turn a quick phone check into a task list we feel compelled to take care of. Consider how many of these notifications are advertisements to get back on an app, instead of truly relevant-to-us information. In most smartphones, by the way, these notifications can be customized in the phone’s settings menu. That way, when we open up a phone for a particular task, it becomes easier to not be distracted by 10 other things to pay attention to.

It can also help to navigate away from short-form and towards slower forms of media like lengthier articles and long-form videos (e.g., video essays). Optimizing your content journey for depth over breadth (and quality over quantity) leads to less overwhelm and a better understanding of the value we can derive from it. Short-form content is, in many ways, similar to fast food: it’s easy to get, cheap, fun, and doesn’t require much thought. But it’s also often cheaply made, ultraprocessed, and lacking nutrition. It’s healthier to consume something that takes more time to make and more time to digest. Short-form can be great at times, but just as a fast-food taco place shouldn’t be your only source of food, neither should 20-second sound bites be your only source of news and knowledge.

We can also counteract some of our information overload by intentionally being bored. When we turn to doom scrolling every time we feel slightly understimulated, it can limit the time we allow our brains to rest and process all the information we toss at it. It can be helpful to simply do nothing in silence every once and a while, and schedule time to allow ourselves to be entirely bored without a stream of content at our fingertips. Taking time to be intentionally screen-free is critical, especially in cases where our job, education, or hobbies are screen-based. Being bored is associated with improved mood, better creativity, and a host of other positive outcomes. Despite what hustle culture may have to say, it can be essentially productive to do nothing.

Our lives are defined by this strange and wonderful information era, but it is up to us to decide whether its access is a net positive or a bane on social progress and individual well-being. To make this era one of enlightenment, we have to establish behaviors that keep information and learning enlightening instead of a burden.

We have to start treating fast media the way we treat fast food: it should not make up our entire or even most of our diets. We cannot forget that this sort of information wasn’t made to be nutritious, but to be an engaging enough dopamine hit to keep us watching. To function well, we need a reasonable amount of wholesome information, not a constant drip-feed of ultra-processed snippets.

Where information is in abundance, attention becomes the limiting resource. We must, then, treat our attention like a rarity and discern what information is worthy of our time and what information we can afford to remain ignorant of.

It is a privilege to be alive in a time and place where information feels infinite, but it is our collective responsibility to make that access a benefit. It is up to us to choose what information shapes the way we think.