Information Overload

The world has changed

When I was 15 it was hard to share information:

• There were three TV channels to watch, and my parents wouldn’t let me look at one of them.
• When I did my homework I had to go to the library to find the single book on [insert subject of choice].
• I wrote a letter to my girlfriend every week.  They were profound (and needed a stamp).
• We had one telephone, we used it to talk to people.
• I thought teletext was a revelation.

I was long on attention and short on information

34 years on my daughter is 15 years old:

• She has 94 free-view channels to choose from, her parents refuse to pay for Sky or Netflix or…
• She found out about [insert subject of choice] on-line. There were 7,950,000 pages to choose from.
• Her boyfriend sends her status updates every 7 minutes. They are a stream of drivel.
• She has a phone with 122 apps on it, she never uses it to talk to anybody.
• She thought teletext was a joke.

She is long on information and short on attention

More isn’t more

The challenge today isn’t to give more information, it is to give the right information.

Less is more

Make life easy for your customers, managers and employees. Don’t provide them with endless data and information, they can’t cope. Get to the point and filter out the rubbish.

Google has made more money than you and I can shake a stick at by solving that problem.

We are overloaded with information

Still don’t believe me? Watch the video.

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Image by James Marvin Phelps