Drowning In Excessive Information

Things are getting crazy. When I say 'things' am referring specifically to the extent of information that bombards our senses these days. My laptop has lost space. Space to accommodate the flood of information that comes from all directions in a given minute. For consistent observers, our present world enabled by fast developments in Information and technology has engendered a situation where in a given minute, one can receive a variety of messages and information on various communication gadgets. In communication, the term banded around was 'access' to information, however, I argue that these days the receiver is no longer making effort to access information in the old fashion sense; information is 'pushed' to him from various points.
To prove my point, I carried an unscientific experiment. I have on my computer desktop a flock social browser. Within a period of 30 minutes, most conversations between my friends on facebook appeared in my sidebar. I was notified every second when a friend updated his or her status or commented on an issue raised by another friend. Then flock gives me access to the video and pictures they upload and update. In addition, am constantly notified about activities of my contacts on flickr, while gmail notifies me every 3o minutes about updates to my email. As for Twitter the least said about it the better. I get know where all my friends are or maybe every day and night.
To elaborate further, any comment left on my blog is sent to me. I have not mentioned the constant notification of shyte, hi5 orkut and others about my friends birth dates. While at it left me point to the fact that with the arrival of 3G technology my mobile phone is now a platform for receiving all these notifications. This is in addition to the persistent ads pushed to me by MTN, Zain and others to participate in one competition or the other.
The scenario I have painted here is to do with just ordinary every day information with social friends. What happens to students studying in various courses? How can these basket full of information be a deterrence to knowledge? The answer to this can lie firmly in seeing how distractive excess information can be to learning and acquisition of information.
For awhile, information overload has not be considered as noise, especially if noise is defined narrowly in its audible form. However, if noise is perceived in a broad perception as any tangible or intangible stimulus that serve to distract, disturb or hinder effective transmission, interpretation and reception of a message or an idea than the argument that too much information can be a dangerous disincentive to learning is valid.
The average student in his or her research has to contend with a range of search sources like wikipedia, blogs, yahoo, google and other meta-search engines. The situtation is aggravated by the spoil for choices. The provision of alternatives can be viewed as epitomizing democracy however the student may become lost and confused in the proverbial midst of plenty. The act of choosing from numerous and varied alternatives has its inherent dangers. A non-discerning student may become exhausted, irritated and may even give up due to the amount of mental effort needed in the analysis of so much array of information.
Let me bring this discussion to the political level. In the prelude to the 2008 elections the NPP carried primaries that pointed to how undemocratic and annoying too much choices and information can be. The over 17 candidates presented for the consideration of the public lead to mental exhaustion and switching off. It has been referred to by many political commentators as the beginning of the lose of the elections by the NPP.
Too much information can be dangerous, anti-democratic, a noise, a disincentive to learning and psychologically annoying.
I am contributing to the phenomenon of information overload by writing this post. I need to end it.