Let’s start with what most people probably can agree.

Information is accumulating online. The amount of available information is increasing at an exponential rate, some say it doubles every second year. This mean that any illusion of being able to stay up to date with everything that is going on is utopian and has been probably since Gutenberg invented the press.

Most people know this, yet that is exactly exactly what we all seem to be doing.

There is no shortage of content aggregators and aggregators of aggregators, daily developed to give us a better overview of all the sources of information we have subscribed to and found ourselves now depending on.

This has resulted in an endless stream of articles, news, pictures, websites, products, updates, comments of updates and comments to these comments, being delivered to us second by second that each of us have to deal with.

Constantly checking our feeds for new information, we seem to be hoping to discover something of interest, something that we can share with our networks, something that we can use, something that we can talk about, something that we can act on, something we didn’t know we didn’t know.

It almost seems like an obsession and many critics of digital technology would argue that by consuming information this way we are running the danger of destroying social interaction between humans. One might even say that we have become slaves of the feed.

At every point in human history there have been philosophers claiming that the current civilization has fallen from an earlier halcyon state, that the ways of the ancients had been lost, and modern innovations and practices threatened to destroy all that was good in society and culture.

This thread of Western philosophical discourse — attention scarcity, future shock, information overload — has become the conventional wisdom. It seems to be based on unassailable and unshakable logic. But what is that logic?

The framing of the argument includes the unspoken premise that once upon a time in some hypothetical past attention wasn’t scarce, we didn’t suffer from too much information, and we had all the time in the world to reason about the world, our place in it, and therefore to make wise and grounded decisions.

But my reading of human history suggests the opposite. In the pre-industrial world, business people and governments still suffered from incomplete information, and the pace of life always seemed faster than what had gone on in earlier times. At every point in human history there have been philosophers claiming that the current civilization has fallen from an earlier halcyon state, that the ways of the ancients had been lost, and modern innovations and practices threatened to destroy all that was good in society and culture. 

So, this is merely the most recent spin on an ancient theme, as the Diderot quote indicates.

Imagine for a moment that it is true — there was an idyllic time back in the Garden of Eden — when we knew all that was necessary to know, and we had all the time in the world to make decisions. Maybe. I am betting it is a shadow of our psychology, the same sort of magical thought that believes in guardian angels and reincarnation. Just a slightly more intellectual superstition.

-Stowe Boyd   The false question of attention economics