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Living in the Information Age

There is a tsunami of data that is crashing onto the beaches of the civilized world. This is a tidal wave of unrelated, growing data formed in bits and bytes, coming in an unorganised, uncontrolled, incoherent cacophony of foam. [1]

We call this an Information Age, but in fact what we live in is a data age. Information is useful. Information is packaged. Information is meaningful. What we are drowning in is too much data.

Is it any wonder we have so much trouble remembering? To be remembered easily, information needs to be organized, information needs to be meaningful, information needs to come at us at a slow enough pace for us to process it.

The world encourages forgetting

Boyd Swinburn, medical director of New Zealand’s National Heart Foundation, talks of the environmental determinants of behavior — the problem people have with keeping weight off is not, he says, because they’re weak-willed, but because our environment doesn’t encourage regular exercise, and does encourage unhealthy eating₂. In the same way, our environment encourages memory failure. Unfortunately, it also requires successful remembering.

Too many faces

One of the most common problems people have with their memory is remembering names and faces. This everyday situation exemplifies the demands of our time. How many people do we come into contact with during our lifetime? How does this compare with the life of the average peasant in medieval Europe? With the member of a prehistoric tribes? Even with a Victorian businessman?

Apart from the people we actually physically meet (if only in passing on the street), think of all the different faces that appear on our TV screens. Our ability to recognize faces is truly incredible, and probably better than any other memory ability, but we make very heavy demands on it today.

In the old days, you would have a circle of people with whom you would spend your whole life. When you married, you would widen this circle. Maybe you emigrate, and start a new life, but only a very small number of people changed their lives as constantly as people do today.

Information overload!

We all have trouble remembering the details of specific bits of information. In particular we have trouble remembering where and when we came across the information. It’s not so much that there’s too much information — our brains have an exceedingly large capacity. The problem is that the information is not sufficiently well organized. It isn’t well enough encoded in memory.

Too much information coming too fast encourages us to opt out — to let our minds wander and give up the unequal struggle. In 1994, ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) was nominated by Wired magazine as “the official brain syndrome of the information age”.

Information overload is implicated in increased stress, confusion, frustration, impaired judgment, decreased benevolence, and overconfidence. We tend to pass the buck more; we tend to ignore anything we can get away with ignoring; we tend to give less time to things.

Remembering well is about remembering wisely

In a way, these strategies are adaptive. The trouble is that these strategies aren’t thought out. We’re letting the situation control what we attend to, when we should be the ones controlling what we choose to attend to.

Coping with the deluge of data requires thoughtful selection. There’s nothing wrong with not remembering everything, but we should be the ones choosing what we’re going to remember.

Learning is forever

Learning new skills and new information isn’t something we leave behind in school. It’s something we have to keep doing forever.