One of my masters students happened to dredge up a quote from Herbert Simon that nails the problem of information overload. And then I have to laugh when I see that he was thinking about this back in 1971. This from the description of Attention economy in Wikipedia:
"...in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it" (Simon, 1971, Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World, p 40-41.).
The focus of the quote is on attention, but that is the problem of information overload - we lose the ability to focus our attention on those things that really need it.
Love the title of the book too!
And I see this isn't the first time this quote has opened my eyes. I knew it sounded familiar!