My site was down a little yesterday.  It is rare, so I am not too worried.  I was trying to post a bit of fluff about the similarity between our modern diets and the rise of obesity, and the glut of information and the rise of the internet.  I do not believe that the internet is necessarily a bad thing:  there are indications that our googlosity is turning us into better readers.

Nevertheless, I have for a long suspected that there has been a change in way many of us process information.  A hundred years ago a dearth of information in our environment forced us to be observant and extrapolate from the data we have available.  Nowadays we have too much (?) information and need to filter out what is extraneous.  These are very different skills.

But I’m not sure that this is a bad thing.  Of course we would like to develop both skills.  Consider, for example, the difference between books and movies.  The act of reading is a cooperation between the reader and writer.  The former has to engage to fully enjoy a book.  Modern movies contains a lot of details — too much for most people to appreciate.  The viewer is passive, and the director controls the product.  This is certainly not true for all books and movies, but I think it holds in most cases.  Another example may be the comparison between crossword puzzles and games like Tetris.

The danger is not the presence of too much information, but the absence of situations where we cannot escape the flood of data.