Information Overflow

Like eat­ing, con­sum­ing in­for­ma­tions should have a por­tion. We have lim­ited ap­petiet, too much eat­ing re­sults into sick stom­ach, stress. Fear of Missing Out or FOMO, is a kind of anx­ity that comes from “too much in­for­ma­tion”.

Internet might be the source of this. Why ? Open in­ter­net, bring mas­sive, free, and ac­ces­si­ble in­for­ma­tion into soc­ity. Social me­dia, a de­cen­dant of in­ter­net known as “rich” in in­for­ma­tion, such as Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok, Youtube. Game, richer than those socmeds com­bine au­dio, vi­sual, story telling and in­ter­ac­tiv­ity.

So, what is the root that cause this “Information Overflow” ?

Is it our be­hav­iour that keep star­ing at our screen ? Is it the con­text switch­ing? Socmed has many dif­fer­ent con­text be­tween it tweets. Is it cre­ates low qual­ity in ab­sorb­ing in­for­ma­tion ? Is it cre­at­ing the FOMO ? Do we ac­tu­ally have this “quality” ?

My hunch is yes. Actullay, i barely re­mem­ber the tweets that i have read. When i found an in­ter­est­ing ar­ti­cel/​tweet i save it into “getpocket” app. But, its un­likely that i’ll visit them in get­pocket. This might be the re­sult of FOMO.

In Software Engineering, there is a phrase You Aren’t Gonna Need It or Yagni. It means, you rarely need some­thing that be­yond scope. Now, how to iden­tify if some­thing cat­e­go­rized as Yagni ? If it less or in­signif­i­cant, leave it, put it into Yagni. I think, in­for­ma­tion around in­ter­net is the same, the level of sig­nif­i­cant will weigh them to falls into Yagni or not.

But, how to make the in­for­ma­tion a Yagni or not for us, if we have not read or saw it ? I don’t know yet. May be, we can hide them be­hind a soft­ware. It is like some­one hand picked in­for­ma­tion for us in di­gestable size.