PUBLIC MARKS with tag infobesite

But with so many government, non-government and research organizations with overlapping but frequently competing agendas producing so much data, the task to break through a wall of numbers becomes even harder. For citizens across the world it is challenging to select what information matters and what doesn’t, especially when there are corporate and media forces attempting to distract us from the most critical knowledge.

My activities may be more symbolic than not, but if 300 million people started sending private information to federal agents, the government would need to hire as many as another 300 million people, possibly more, to keep up with the information and we’d have to redesign our entire intelligence system.

Complaints about information overload, usually couched in terms of the overabundance of books, have a long history — reaching back to Ecclesiastes 12:12 (“of making books there is no end,” probably from the 4th or 3d century BC). The ancient moralist Seneca complained that “the abundance of books is distraction” in the 1st century AD, and there have been other info-booms from time to time — the building of the Library of Alexandria in the 3d century BC, or the development of newspapers starting in the 18th century.

a bucket of intentions instead of a “to read” list. Letting go is part of finding peace in this information overload age.

So where does all this information we consume come from? Everywhere, it turns out. The report suggests the average American consumes 34 gigabytes of content and 100,000 words of information in a single day. (Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” is only 460,000 words long.) This doesn’t mean we read 100,000 words a day — it means that 100,000 words cross our eyes and ears in a single 24-hour period. That information comes through various channels, including the television, radio, the Web, text messages and video games.

Perhaps some of the problem with information overload is that while there's a great many channels for producing information there's only very few channels for consuming information.