Technostress and Poverty of Attention
A little bit of a philosophical spray today, armchair style.
Most readers would be familiar with the concept of information overload (IO) and the impact IO can have on our ability to find, select and process only the essential data from the infosphere, and to filter out the background ‘noise’. Note we are not talking spam here, which is essentially attention theft.
There are other terms for IO too, like information pollution, digital distraction, and perhaps my favourite technostress. While technostress is probably more a symptom or result of IO, it likely lowers our tolerance of IO and forms a vicious feedback loop.
The phrase “information rich, attention poor” highlights the practical effects of IO quite well. IO is a serious challenge that besets lowly information workers and executive decision makers alike on a daily basis. At the macro or economy-wide level our aggregate struggle with IO has serious implications for our national productivity and continued economic well-being as well.
The great Amercian political scientist Herbert Simon knew a thing or two about information overload and its consequences, observing in 1971 in Computers, Communications and the Public Interest that:
What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
He wasn’t kidding. Wikipedia reports that a recent article in the New Scientist claimed exposing individuals to an information overloaded environment resulted in lower IQ scores than exposing individuals to marijuana, although these results are contested. The same article also notes that over-exposure to information can be as debilitating as a night without sleep. And we all know how that feels.
So what is the key to overcoming IO and its adverse effects on our attention span and ability to focus? According to a doctor part of the answer may lie in the fact that information work, particularly computer work, requires significant and often intensive levels of multi-tasking, day in day out.
Is it surprising that this same brain does not do well when forced to isolate down to one task? Listening in a meeting is a very isolated, very passive event. Coding, developing, debugging — these are not passive at all. The geek brain is just not trained to sit quietly and listen.
Can we break our modern addiction to multi-tasking, long considered a driver of productivity in our IT and information-intensive workplaces? I’m not sure, but I think I better leave it there lest I overtax your attention and you go find something else to read. 
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