Information overload

Nowadays, I think everyone is suffering from an information overload. I definitely consume information at a crazy rate. I’ve come across a pretty interesting term called selective ignorance.

Selective ignorance is “the practice of selectively ignoring distracting, irrelevant or otherwise unnecessary information received.” It sounds pretty bad at first glance, but I think there’s something to learn for everyone in terms of picking and choosing what information to pay attention to. Then there are, of course, tons of ways to screw up the concept of selective ignorance. 

First off, if there’s at least one thing I should be selectively ignorant about, it’s my use of Facebook. In fact, as I’m writing this column, I’m also checking out Facebook. If you’re one my Facebook friends, you’ve already noticed almost every time you’re on Facebook, I’m also logged on. I’m easily on several hours per day.

Every time I’m at a computer, I’m on Facebook. If I’ve got my Blackberry in my hands, you can pretty much guess what I’m doing: checking out Facebook. With the beginning of a new semester, I’ve tried to be selectively ignorant by forgetting about Facebook, but it hasn’t worked yet. The Facebook problem is obviously going to take some time. 

Some of the things that I think everyone should be selectively ignorant of are phone calls and text messages.

You’ve probably been doing this forever, but recently I’ve begun setting my Blackberry to quiet at a certain point in the night. So if you try to reach me at night, I won’t get back to you until morning. It sounds pretty simple, but there are probably tons of people that stay up until crazy hours because of phone call and text messages. 

Another thing that I can’t quite get a handle on is e-mails. I don’t necessarily have a problem with receiving a massive amount of e-mails. For some odd reason, I really get a kick out of sending and receiving e-mails, and having a Blackberry doesn’t help. Seeing that little red light blink and hearing that little ‘pop’ sound on my Blackberry is an extremely gratifying feeling.

If I’m not checking my e-mail on my Blackberry, then I’m checking it on my Gmail account. Gmail allows you to know whether other Gmail users are logged on. I pretty much wait until that user is logged on, and then I e-mail them. If you don’t respond, I know you’ve at least noticed I e-mailed you. On my Gmail account I have about a dozen folders to organize e-mails, so about every week I like to go through all my old e-mails and categorize each and every one of them. I’m still working on having selective ignorance when it comes to my e-mails. 

Something else that I tend to get in over my head in is my use of tabs while browsing the internet. Okay, at this point you know that I have at least two tabs running, Facebook and Gmail. In addition to those tabs, I’m usually logged on to Twitter, I’m listening to the radio online, I’m reading a couple of blogs and with work, I usually wind up with at least 12 tabs. Sometimes it gets so annoying I have to exit the browser and start over. I pretty much need to limit the number of tabs I use. 

With information coming to us from everywhere, we should all practice a little selective ignorance.