Gina Trapani at Lifehacker has called into question many of the numerous productivity studies floating around that show we are burdened by “information overload”, our productivity siphoned off by the endless flood of email and the tendency to multitask.
The longer I do this, the more I suspect that a good part of the “information overload” story is a myth cooked up by folks who don’t know how to use the internet well in order to demonize something they don’t understand. I get more done via email and surfing the web than my parents ever did using phones and libraries, even when I’m having a bad day and switch to my email application the moment I see a new message notification.
Clay Shirky would probably agree. He wrote a book called Here Comes Everybody and states that we are simply dealing with what he calls a “cognitive surplus”. Shirky’s reasoning in this: Once World War II was over, we suddenly had a surplus of time on our hands with no idea of how to use it effectively. That surplus, he argues, was eaten up for many years through mindless consumption of television shows. Only now are we beginning to figure out how to effectively use it. By producing and sharing information through things such as Wikipedia, blogs, etc., we are using up some of that extra time and energy and in return creating new things.
So which is it? Do we have a “cognitive surplus” or are we suffering from “information overload” (which could be defined as a “cognitive deficit”)? I would say it’s a little of both.
Looking at it with an historical perspective, it’s easy to see we’re in the midst of a technological revolution on the magnitude of (and most likely greater than) the Industrial Revolution that occurred in Britain and America in the 1800s. Any time you go through such a drastic transformation, it affects all aspects of society. And those changes can cause a tremendous amount of distress and anxiety as people struggle to adjust, hence a feeling of “overload”.
At the same time, we now have both the motivation to use our excess time and energy for creating new things and the tools with which to do so, leading to what Jonathan Zittrain calls “generativity”.
