Information Overload I

"Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition."(Marshall McLuhan, "Counterblast", 1969)

"We live in and age of hyper-awareness, our senses extend around the globe, but it's the case of aesthetic overload: our technical zeal has outstripped our psychic capacity to cope with the influx of information." (Gene Youngblood, "Expanded Cinema", 1970) 

"What about confusing clutter? Information overload? Doesn't data have to be ‘boiled down’ and  ‘simplified’? These common questions miss the point, for the quantity of detail is an issue completely separate from the difficulty of reading. Clutter and confusion are failures of design, not attributes of information." (Edward R Tufte, "Envisioning Information", 1990)

"'Point of view' is that quintessentially human solution to information overload, an intuitive process of reducing things to an essential relevant and manageable minimum. [...] In a world of hyperabundant content, point of view will become the scarcest of resources." (Paul Saffo, "It's The Context, Stupid", 1994) 

"We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning." (Jean Baudrillard, "Simulacra and simulation", 1994) 

"One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There's always more than you can cope with." (Marshall McLuhan, "Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews" , 2003)

"What’s next for technology and design? A lot less thinking about technology for technology’s sake, and a lot more thinking about design. Art humanizes technology and makes it understandable. Design is needed to make sense of information overload. It is why art and design will rise in importance during this century as we try to make sense of all the possibilities that digital technology now affords." (John Maeda, "Why Apple Leads the Way in Design", 2010) 

"The instinctual shortcut that we take when we have 'too much information' is to engage with it selectively, picking out the parts we like and ignoring the remainder, making allies with those who have made the same choices and enemies of the rest." (Nate Silver, "The Signal and the Noise", 2012)

"Complexity has the propensity to overload systems, making the relevance of a particular piece of information not statistically significant. And when an array of mind-numbing factors is added into the equation, theory and models rarely conform to reality." (Lawrence K Samuels, "Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action", 2013)

"While having information is a crucial first step, more information isn't necessarily better. Take a look at your bookshelves and the list of seminars you have attended. If you have read more than one book about a subject or attended more than one seminar but still haven’t reached your goals, then your problem is not lack of information but rather lack of implementation." (Gudjon Bergmann)