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Articles on information overload

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Beset by advertisements and noxious information, our attention is increasingly fractured. Shutterstock

When critical thinking isn’t enough: to beat information overload, we need to learn ‘critical ignoring’

Lateral reading, self-nudging and a persistent refusal to feed the trolls are some of the ways one can better manage information.
Media multitasking: constantly juggling media and non-media activities, often using multiple digital devices. GettyImages

Your phone and your brain - what we know so far

Analysis of 46 studies indicates that there’s still a lot of uncertainty about the long-term impacts of digital device use on cognition.
‘I want to produce such an impression of utter weariness and ennui that my readers will imagine the book could only have been written by a cretin,’ Flaubert wrote. Photo by Nadar / ullstein bild via Getty Images

We’re living in the bizarre world that Flaubert envisioned

Is a 19th-century French author’s cosmic joke turning into a real-life global nightmare?
The daily fluctuations in the stock market can have a serious emotional impact on people watching their stock portfolios, when the less stressful strategy would be to pay attention to long-term trends. (Shutterstock)

Managing the highs and lows of data overload

Today it’s estimated that we take in about five times as much information as we did 25 years ago, and that we process as much data in a day as our 15th century ancestors would have in their lifetime.

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