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Information Overload: How Much Does It Cost? — 9 Comments

  1. I agree that our society is definitely overloaded with information, most of it not worth your time. As you probably remember, we got rid of our TV years ago. But on Sept 11, 2001, we had a TV hooked up out in the apartment next to our house. After hearing the initial report on the radio, we went out to watch the TV to see what was going on. Of course, at that time the “talking heads” didn’t know what was going on, but they just kept talking and repeating themselves and making up things. So, networks news was pretty worthless even back then.
    We keep up today by just a few minutes of radio in the morning, a few minutes of Fox News headlines from the computer at night. Occasionally someone says, “Did you hear about __?” and no, we didn’t, but overall we haven’t missed anything important, and we can spend that time thinking good things instead.

    • Thanks for commenting Sarah! I’ll be honest I feel like I’m going through withdrawl today. I keep reaching for my phone to check things that aren’t there anymore. It just seems that so many are getting a bit crazed by the things that they see on the news and read on the internet. It will be interesting to see what gets accomplished in the next month without news and some of these other distractions.

  2. My wife and I absolutely abhor the way the local news channels glorify violence in all forms and place it high above goodness. I call their their “news” “The murder, death and mayhem report.” Every single day they lead off the show with the most horrendous things one can imagine, family violence, the latest murder reports, shoving a microphone in a grieving mother’s face, showing burned puppies that have been tortured, zooming in on families houses burning to the ground, and on and on. To have this type of “news” shoved in your face every single day can NOT be good for you. It convinces us that there are “monsters around every corner” just waiting to pounce on us. It makes us afraid to let our children play in the front yard or walk to the corner grocery even though these things, in all honesty, are very safe. We have allowed ourselves to be conditioned to believe that there are no good people in poor neighborhoods or that if you go to “this part of town” you are likely to be robbed, or worse. If they can’t find enough horrible things to report locally, they’ll go to California, or New York City, or wherever the most vile, repulsive activity is taking place and “report” it to us.

    I don’t need that kind of negativity in my life. I don’t want to envision burned puppies and children being shot in the head every morning, noon and night. I believe the local news has a place but it has been dragged down to the lowest common denominator of viewers. Instead of catering to the Devil’s side of life, how about we focus more on God’s side, like showing the reports of churches doing good works in their communities. How about showing more kids making a difference by volunteering to help others (they do this every day, we just don’t hear about it!) or raising money to help a classmate with a strong need for their support. How about showing us the things we need to know, like which highways are going to be closed, or reopened? How about helping unwanted pets get adopted? How about LEADING off with these stories?

    They might be surprised and just how many people would prefer not to be bombarded with negativity and horror every day and would choose to watch a positive show that gave us information we could use and people we could look up to as examples of good citizenship.

    • I hear you Dempsy! I think that is the whole idea behind the news show that is on 52. I think it is called local news or something like that. A lot of familiar personalities are on it and it is geared at human interest stories and not so much of the bad stuff that is going on. You should check it out!

  3. I guess that means you’re blocking my pictures to you of Lucky and my modeling clay diaramas ! BTW, my 52 is a Spanish station.

    • I’ve been seeing Lucky just fine Ted 😉 I can’t remember which station that new format of newscast is on. Do you remember?

  4. So, I was able to go to a conference a little ways back and came across this lady name Maura Thomas who wrote “Personal Productivity Secrets.” She challenged the idea of information overload with the concept of items that steal our attention thereby stealing our productivity. As she puts it, yes we can get information more quickly, but there has always been more information in the world than a person is able to consume. She sets up a system of how you can stay productive, set realistic goals, and not feel the constant sense of being overwhelmed. Her ideas are really great and I really recommend her book.

    • Thanks for the recommendation Annalisa. I’ll have to check out her stuff. At a quick glance it looks pretty similar to David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” or GTD philosophy. A system for stream-lining and processing

      I can tell you this, it has been an amazingly wonderful 1.5 days without so many distractions 🙂