You With The Phone! Step Away From The Internet!

The never-ending list of things you don't actually need to know

In a recent conversation with a friend, we began talking about the issues confronting a sustainable world from a seminar she had recently attended. At one point in our discussion we touched on the the inherent problem with a democracy: people can be told what to think and still consider it to be their idea, thereby shaping the policy of a nation by those who control the information. The fact that we now have unprecedented access to a dizzying amount of data doesn’t actually help this; if anything, it makes us less able to decide for ourselves, but more likely to think we’re making informed choices. This then started me thinking deeper about the issues of this deluge of info, including why it was such a problem, and what might save us from death by information.

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