Information Fatigue Syndrome?

I was perusing the newspapers from October 1914 as I have a lot of curiosity about what was going on around the time in which Pinnacol as a company was created. This week in 1914 wasn't too different than some of what is going on now. The election cycle for Governor was in full swing and there was a fair amount of negative campaigning then as there is now. Our then future Governor, George Carlson, who would be instrumental in passing the first Workers' Compensation Act for our state, was loved or hated, depending on the source, about as much in 1914 as Governor Hickenlooper and his opponent Bob Beauprez are today.

Scrolling through the news of the day I came across an article, totally unrelated to politics, that I thought presented a stark contrast between then and now. The subject? The importance of staying informed in a changing world. The article, from the Routt County Republican, dated Friday October 9, 2014, argued that people should make the effort to not just read a monthly magazine to stay abreast of what was going on. Instead they should be reading a good weekly magazine to keep up with what the article called "the march of events".

I had to chuckle because in today's world anyone who only read something on a weekly or monthly basis to stay current would be badly out of step with current events. The article did get me to thinking that back in 1914 people might have thought that weekly information might be information overload, which is something that I think we all deal with today. An article on the blog Digital Intelligence Today from November 14, 2013 written by Paul Marsden made the contrast quite clear:

IFS (information fatigue syndrome)

Definition:  When the volume of potentially useful and relevant information available exceeds processing capacity and becomes a hindrance rather than a help
90% of all the data in the world has been generated over the last two years
Information consumption in the US is in the order of 3.6 zettabytes (3.6 million million gigabytes)
The average American consumes 34 gigabytes / 12 hours of information per day – outside of work
“Between the dawn of civilization through 2003 about 5 exabytes of information was created. Now, that much information created every 2 days” (Eric Schmidt – former Google CEO)
In the US, people who text send or receive an average of 35 texts per day
28% of office workers time is spent dealing with emails
The typical Internet user is exposed to 1,707 banner ads per month
The human brain has a theoretical memory storage capacity of 2.5 petabytes (or a million gigabytes)
The maximum number of pieces of information a human brain can handle concurrently is 7 (Miller’s Law)
Information (over)load is linked to greater stress, and poorer health
Overuse of social media can lead to short-term memory loss

Much of this would have been absolute gibberish to someone back in 1914, but its interesting that even back then there was a perceived struggle as to how to effectively stay informed regarding the "march of events"...