Humanity: Collective Information Overload?

We've never faced collective, global information flows like we are today. Is this creating a cognitive overload for humanity as a whole? Let's explore.

Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash

You’ve probably experienced one of those days that goes by in a blur. Busy working or doing fun stuff. You look at that person next to you and say “where did the day go?” One wonders if our foraging ancestors pondered this too? “How did we pick so many berries?”

We’ve been through a fair bit lately, us humans. A global pandemic, economic turmoils, rising conflicts. Weird politics all over the world. Massive social movements, unrest. Discomfort. Unease. It may seem like, well, we’re just not getting along.

So let’s step back a bit, maybe a lot. Go up to 80,000 feet or maybe space station level and look down on our planet. Look at things from a different perspective. What’s different today from yesterday?

Thing is, we’ve always been going through a lot. For well, ever since we’ve been around. Humans are a bit messy as a species. But we have progressed, even through times when we’ve not really got along well with one another.

So what’s different this time? Why does it all seem just, well, so much? Are we in a time, perhaps of collective cognitive overload? We may well be. Why?

First off, as a species, globally, we’ve just never been this connected before. Nor have we been able to putter about the planet like we can now. While transportation technology is faster, it is not as fast as the movement of information. This makes a big difference.

Just a few decades ago, it still took a while for information to move around the world and hit the masses. Until extremely recently, as in less than twenty years, our cogitators, our brains, used to have time and space on our side. Oceans, mountain ranges, deserts. Slow boats to China. Life was, in fact, slower. We had time and space to figure out how to get along.

In terms of evolution as a whole being near 4 billion years, humanity has been around a nanosecond. Our global interconnectivity? A nanosecond of a nanosecond.

Us humans, today’s Homo Sapiens, are the hominids to have evolved out of a rather messy and confusing bunch of other hominids. And we’re finding more distant relatives all the time. Paleoanthropologists even think Neanderthals had language. They did not have social media influencers, so maybe that’s why Homo Sapiens won out?

Sociologist Dr. Harmut Rosa has come up with an interesting and seemingly logical theory called the temporal rebound effect (of which I’ve written before.) Which essentially is that while technology may save us time, it means more is placed on us, in terms of things to do, than before. It also means that more is placed in our brains to have to process than before. Information overload.

What I call Collective Cognitive Information Overload. At a macro, species level. We may well experience information overload individually, but perhaps we are also experiencing it as an entire species.

For now, any evidence of this is purely speculative and anecdotal. But it does seem to make sense as a hypothesis, which suggests it’s worth researching. Such research would not be a minor undertaking. But because we are so interconnected, it may be possible to design such an experiment. We could do this, but that’s not the point of this article.

The point is that we’ve spent a lot of time and research money on how we’re all infinitely distracted and it’s all down to everything digital that perhaps, we’ve missed the whole point after all. That we’re collectively in some sort of foggy, dissolute cognitive overload as a species. And it’s becoming harder and harder to offload the overload.

All of us Homo Sapiens, shuffling around the planet taking selfies and doing silly things and clever things, are a singular species. Our shapes, colours and cultures may vary, but the fact that we are all human does not. If we’re under an information deluge globally, then so must we be as a species.

We may exist in physical places that we call cities, provinces, states, counties or nations, but those are purely made up, entirely imagined. As the internet really has no boundaries, the reality of “nations” too, are just something we made up. Our nomadic ancestors would find this all quite funny. Those suffering through a conflict, do not.

So we tend to do research on things like digital and information overload, how technology affects society and social media and all that, either from a singular sociocultural perspective or politically determined geography (a.k.a. nation state) rather than as a species.

When the Beatles released a song in the 50’s and 60’s, it took a while to plod it’s way around the globe. When their last and newest song was released this past week it traveled around the world in a few hours. And you didn’t need to tune into a radio station or wait weeks to mob a record store to get a copy.

Every revolutionary technology speeds up time to some degree. And the movement of information. Ideas. Ideologies; political, social and economic. Now, they flow incessantly, ravenous and never, it seems, finding a place to rest and digest. To offload the overload.

Perhaps some Artificial Intelligence tools could help? Some might point to Generative AI (GAI) or Large Language Models, but the larger the language in the model it seems, the greater the hallucinations. We’re already hallucinating enough.

We like to think that “ages” and periods in time end suddenly. Like one day, the Romans got up unusually early one morning, had a nice breakfast, and said “alright lads, this Empire thing is a bit tedious, let’s all pack it in and move to a villa in the countryside.” Or the French also got up early one morning, fed up with eating cake and had a revolution. These things take a long time to reach a tipping point.

So perhaps too, we’re slowly moving towards this point where one day we’ll prefer to turn off our devices, find a good book, the printed sort, and read and chill rather than Netflix and chill.

Our current time isn’t anymore special than past current times. It just seems like it. But it is amplified because we’ve never been so connected. The upside, fortunately, is that we do tend to sort things out. Humans prefer, although Hobbes might disagree, to get along more than we do to not get along. If we didn’t like getting along, we never would’ve figured out how to get along in the first place. Now we’re just figuring out how to get along while we just to process all this information we never had to before. To somehow, offload the overload and go pick some berries.