More Poll Excitement: Information Overload
January 5, 2017
I read “Really? Most Americans Don’t Suffer Information Overload.” The main idea is that folks in the know, in the swim, and in the top one percent suffer from too much information. The rest of the ignorance-is-bliss crowd has a different perception.
The write up explains, reports, states:
A new report from the Pew Research Center says that most Americans do not suffer from information overload—even though many of us frequently say otherwise.
What’s up with that?
The write up points out:
Many people complain about the volume of information coming at us. But we want it. Adweek reported earlier this year that the average person consumes almost 11 hours of media per day. That’s everything from text messages to TV programs to reading a newspaper.
Well, the Pew outfit interviewed 1,520 people which is sample approved by those who look in the back of statistics 101 textbooks rely upon. I have no details about the demographics of the sample, geographic location, and reason these folks took time out from watching Netflix to answer the Pew questions, however.
The answer that lots of people don’t suffer from information overload seems wrong when viewed from the perspective of a millennial struggling to buy a house while working as a customer support rep until the automated system is installed.
But wait. The write up informs me:
the recent national election showed that “in a lot of ways people live in small information bubbles. They get information on social media that has been filtered for them. It is filtered by the network they belong to. In a lot of ways, there’s less information and much of it is less diverse than it was in an earlier era.” The public’s hunger for that information is reflected in a study conducted by Bank of America. The bank found that 71 percent of the people they surveyed sleep within arm’s reach of their smartphone. And 3 percent of those people hold their smartphone while they’re in dreamland.
Too much information for me.
Stephen E Arnold, January 5, 2017
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