CAN WE ESCAPE INFORMATION OVERLOAD?
Pouvons-nous échapper à la surcharge informationnelle?
En 2017, un artiste britannique décide de passer un mois dans le noir complet pour échapper à toute stimulation visuelle ou sonore. Inspiré par cette expérience, The Economist s'interroge aujourd'hui sur le concept du « trop plein d'information » dans nos sociétés ultra connectées – et de ses conséquences sur notre cerveau.
One day in December 2016 a 37-yearold British artist named Sam Winston equipped himself with a step-ladder, a pair of scissors, several rolls of black-out cloth and a huge supply of duct tape, and set about a project he had been considering for some time. He’d been troubled by nervous energy and stress since he was young, was an intermittent insomniac, had difficulty filtering noise and distractions in public spaces, and was someone who – like so many of us – increasingly relied on his phone and computer. So Winston decided to hole up for a few days. No screens. No sun. No visual stimulation of any kind. He was going to spend some time alone in the dark.
2. In the 21st century, the spill of information and distraction that comes at us by eye has grown and grown ceaselessly, without any sign of a halt or plateau. DM! Breaking-news! Inbox (1)! People watch Oscar-nominated movies while standing in queues, their devices held at waist height. Apple has put an extra screen on our wrists and Google retains quiet hope that we will eventually wear a screen inside our specs. Big news lands in 140 characters or less, ideally with a startling picture or piece of video, else it doesn’t register as big news.
WHAT IS INFORMATION OVERLOAD?
3. Information overload was a term coined in the mid-1960s by Bertram Gross, an American social scientist. Information overload can occur in man or machine, wrote another set of academics in a 1977 study, “when the amount of input to a system exceeds its processing capacity”. Then came VHS, home computers, the internet, mobile phones, mobile-phones-withthe-internet – and waves of anxiety that we might be reaching the limits of our capacity.
4. A study in 2011 found that on a typical day Americans were taking in five times as much information as they had done 25 years earlier – and this was before most people had bought smartphones. In 2019 a study by academics in Germany, Ireland and Denmark identified that humans’ attention span is shrinking, probably because of digital intrusion, but was manifesting itself both “online and offline”.
5. Another organisation called the Information Overload Research Group was co-founded in 2007 by Spira and Nathan Zeldes. By the end
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