It's funny how this was noticed by King Solomon, far before the age of print. "Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body." (Ecclesiastes 12:12b). Apparently information overload was a problem even back then.
Anyway, I agree that we have too much content, but not content in general. We have too much for-profit content. I can't back this up with numbers, but I'm willing to bet that the majority of content creation is just an indirect form of advertising.
Take news sites. Why all those articles are so crappy, full of mistakes, and often outright lies? Because news sites don't care about the truth; the content is just the way to make you see the ads.
Or take all those images people repost on social media. I have a close friend working as a "content marketer", so I get to see first-hand how those images are made. There are people whose job is literally to create dozens of such pictures every week and post them on the pages they manage. The pages themselves are only tangentially related to what is advertised.
The whole scheme works like this: imagine you want to advertise a fitness club you own. So you create a bunch of Facebook pages about dieting, general health and exercise, and you hire a bunch of people to make you an image or two for each page, every day, and to spread them around in a way that links back to said pages. The images are usually pretty useless; the content doesn't matter as long as people share and "like" it. The idea is that you will waste a little bit of lots of people's time hoping that a percent of a percent of those people will convert and pay enough to justify all that social media carpet-bombing.
Frankly, I find this scheme evil, but for some reason it is a respected occupation nowadays...
The problem we really need to solve is wasting other people's time to make money. Content overload will fix itself then.
It's funny how this was noticed by King Solomon, far before the age of print. "Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body." (Ecclesiastes 12:12b). Apparently information overload was a problem even back then.
Anyway, I agree that we have too much content, but not content in general. We have too much for-profit content. I can't back this up with numbers, but I'm willing to bet that the majority of content creation is just an indirect form of advertising.
Take news sites. Why all those articles are so crappy, full of mistakes, and often outright lies? Because news sites don't care about the truth; the content is just the way to make you see the ads.
Or take all those images people repost on social media. I have a close friend working as a "content marketer", so I get to see first-hand how those images are made. There are people whose job is literally to create dozens of such pictures every week and post them on the pages they manage. The pages themselves are only tangentially related to what is advertised.
The whole scheme works like this: imagine you want to advertise a fitness club you own. So you create a bunch of Facebook pages about dieting, general health and exercise, and you hire a bunch of people to make you an image or two for each page, every day, and to spread them around in a way that links back to said pages. The images are usually pretty useless; the content doesn't matter as long as people share and "like" it. The idea is that you will waste a little bit of lots of people's time hoping that a percent of a percent of those people will convert and pay enough to justify all that social media carpet-bombing.
Frankly, I find this scheme evil, but for some reason it is a respected occupation nowadays...
The problem we really need to solve is wasting other people's time to make money. Content overload will fix itself then.