Quotes About Overload

What a glut of books! Who can read them?

...a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention...

It is impossible for individuals to examine the huge number of new books that are being published every day

It's like my brain is firing so fast that it can't keep up with itself. Words. Colors. Sounds. Sometimes everything else fades into the background and all I'm left with is sound. I can hear everything, but not just hear it—I can feel it too. But then it can come on all at once—the sounds turn into light, and the light goes too bright, and it's like it's slicing me in two

There had been too much emotion, too much damage, too much of everything.

Email is having an increasingly pernicious effect. Not only is it having a perceptible effect on productivity, it's skewing what it is we focus on. The immediate increasingly crowds out the important.

I think the American people are bombarded with information from all directions, all day long.

Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant.

Kids are growing up with a bombardment of information through technology.

We are now exposed to more images in a day than anyone in the 14th century would have known in a lifetime. [...] Most of it is garbage. Most of it needs excising. Even if we're fearful that we might be missing something. We are probably not. We have to discard. We have to throw things away, cleanse the doors of our perception and work out what is worth looking at, what is worth remembering, what are the images that matter, what will we retain.

Computer technology has given us instant and cheaper access to more and more information. So naturally that's what we think we want. But what do we get? More information than we need and certainly more than we read. We are suffocating in that avalanche of paper, much of which just gets filed…unread. And most of those reports, proposals, printouts, projections that take so much time to do end up in the round file, the one under your desk.

You got to imagine your memory is like an old bucket, you know? Once it's filled up with old stuff there ain't no way to get new stuff in.

If nature didn't whittle down your network to a smaller number of strongly forged connections, you would never become an adult. You would remain a permanent child, frozen in sensory overload.

In Information Overload: We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us,* the authors state that distractions consume an average of 2.1 hours per day.

News-free existence is not a serious proposal, but it is worth noting that while today's 24/7 media environment is wonderful in many ways, it can also be like drinking out of a fire hose and intensify a downward reinforcing cycle of despair.

I want to prove that Holst's 'The Planets' can be as much of a sensory overload as a concert by the Grateful Dead, and just as exciting.

I like to give people information; that's to a fault.

It is now such a complex society in terms of media. It just comes at us from every direction. You kind of have to push it all away.

Think of it as a little vacation your psyche takes when it has too much to handle. It's like a brownout, an overloading of circuits. Grief is a neurological event.

Like almost everyone who uses e-mail, I receive a ton of spam every day. Much of it offers to help me get out of debt or get rich quick. It would be funny if it weren't so irritating.

Knowing of how to make use of online tools without being overloaded with too much information is, like it or not, an essential ingredient to personal success in the twenty-first century.

The sensation of being alive in the early twenty-first century consisted of the sense that our ability to pay attention—to focus—was cracking and breaking.

The more information you pump in, the less time people can focus on any individual piece of it.

It said that we are, collectively, experiencing "a more rapid exhaustion of attention resources.