Information Overload? Relax

We survived copy machines. We'll survive Twitter.

• By L. GORDON CROVITZ

Just in time for summer, Crown Imports has brought back a popular television advertisement for its Corona beer that first aired in 1998. The new one shows a man at the beach skipping rocks into the sea. He decides to do the same with his BlackBerry -- a beeper in the earlier version -- when it interrupts his relaxation by ringing and vibrating.

The ad addresses one of the key causes of anxiety in the information age: What does it mean that for the first time, information is no longer scarce? We have fast and easy access to the communications and the facts we need, through email, the Web, Facebook, Twitter, text messages and other tools. So now we have the problem of too much supply. How can we escape useless information, unneeded emails and unwanted communications?

Our era in the information age is a transition period of learning how to navigate information abundance. Rather than pitch our BlackBerrys and iPhones into the sea, imagine the benefits once we have figured out how to manage the chaos of endless data and routine multitasking, a process that will help refine our judgment about information and refocus our attention on what's truly important.

For now, popular culture is more troubled than excited by information abundance. Actress Gwyneth Paltrow told an interviewer last week that she spends so much time in Spain because "they seem to enjoy life a little bit more. . . . They don't always have their Blackberrys on." In order to get passengers to pay attention to safety announcements, Air New Zealand decided to show a video of stewardesses and pilots dressed in nothing but body paint.

One of the companies that led the charge on information is trying to make a business out of solving the problem. Xerox says, "We've been navigating the flood of information for 70 years -- since the first xerographic print launched the 'sharing era.'" It makes the case that "too much information can make you feel powerless and unproductive," reporting that more than half of people think that less than half the information they get at work is valuable. Xerox hosts a corporate blog called Information Sanity, with tips on how to cope.

As one data point, a search for "Information Overload" on Google returns 2.92 million results in 0.37 second.

The book "Rapt" by Winifred Gallagher reports that many neuroscientists believe attention is a process of either selecting a topic or not. As suggested by the expression "pay attention," we have a limited ability to focus. If this is right, young people who do their homework while on Twitter, the phone and YouTube may not be engaging deeply enough. "When you're finally forced to confront intellectually demanding situations in high school or college," Ms. Gallagher writes, "you may find that you've traded depth of knowledge for breadth and stunted your capacity for serious thought."

But there's a more optimistic way to think about the issue. Humans adapt, so we'll learn how to live with information overabundance. Young people growing up multitasking are already less anxious about using technology and may well cope better than those of us in older generations. They have no choice but to get more sophisticated at separating the important from the unimportant and the authoritative from the unreliable, even while sampling from among many new kinds of information tools.

Tyler Cowen, an economist and popular blogger, focuses on our broader range of information options in a new book published this month, "Create Your Own Economy." He says, "When access is easy, we tend to favor the short, the sweet, and the bitty. When access is difficult, we tend to look for large-scale productions, extravaganzas, and masterpieces." Mr. Cowen says, "The current trend -- as it has been running for decades -- is that a lot of our culture is coming in shorter and smaller bits."

Different kinds of information are useful for different purposes. "Paying attention" means different things for different tasks. As cognitive scientist David Meyer puts it, "Einstein didn't invent the theory of relativity while multitasking at the Swiss patent office." For other kinds of tasks, though, access to blogs and Twitter posts at least gives us the chance to become aware of issues we might want to pursue further, in greater depth.

Technological progress does not reverse, so the trend toward multitasking and consuming many different types of information will only continue. Getting our heads around information abundance will mean becoming more discerning about what information is worth our time and what kinds of tasks require real focus. Tools like on-demand information and smarter filtering will help.

Still, the development of this human software to deal with an overabundance of information will take some time to catch up to the machine technology that made the information abundance possible. Young people will cope first as we all evolve to become more sophisticated, less anxious users of information.