"A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention."
Info & reflection: A line from 1971 (Simon coined it talking about information overload before the internet) that today sounds almost prophetic. Attention is a scarce resource and doesn't scale with the amount of information available; in fact, the more information there is, the less attention is left for each piece. It's the economic argument behind the whole current talk about the "attention economy".
Related in anthology
- Brené Brown: The Algorithms Have Forced Us Into A Hidden Epidemic, This Is The Only Way Out! — Brené Brown on the "thinking class" that reads philosophy and history while selling the scroll to everyone else: the capacity for attention becomes power