Warning! Warning! Information Overload!

Education ---

Deluged with Information

In this modern age we know more than we have ever known before. We know the what, where, when, how, and why of things.  We are under no pressure to store these information bits in our long term memory for we can retrieve them by the simple touch of a screen with our finger.  This information is so vast that we are at the point at which we are on information overload.  In fact, because we are so inundated with information (brought on by technological advancement) we barely have the time to assess the accuracy or truth of the available info. Its availability has become the measure of its truth.  

We are losing the ability to question things.  Further, we are losing the ability to synthesize ideas or to see the relationship among ideas.  We can access information about causal relationships.  We can get information that one thing causes another, etc., but increasingly lost on us is the logical relationship of ideas.  Ideas and things are now more defined by function or shared characteristics; the quest for the essence of things is too much work and too time consuming.  We arrive at generalizations without induction or specific conclusions without deduction.  We seem to be using our minds more for storage of information and less for analysis, merely content with getting information and thought second-hand rather than generating thought of our own. So deluged are we with information that we no longer seem to have the time to ponder the significance of things.