I still find myself amazed at just how much information we are all exposed to on a daily basis and do not even realize it. Between television, our computers, constant cell phone use, and of course person to person interaction there is such a large exchange of information that goes on in a single day.
Take television for example. You turn on your t.v. and sit down to watch your favorite show, we'll say it's an hour long show. As a viewer, we get so wrapped up in the show and what is going on with the characters and the storyline that we don't even notice the constant overflow of information that is poured down our throats by the advertising world. I was watching the new episode of Sons of Anarchy on Tuesday night when it hit me just how much information we are exposed to. In this "hour" long episode there was probably between 15 and 20 minutes of commercials. And each commercial was different and exposed all the viewers to brand new information each time. This constant exposure is often overlooked by people and we don't realize how much information our brains take in on a regular basis.
Another great example of information overload is found on our social networking sites. I'm sure everyone reading this has a Facebook page so I'll use that as my example. Log into your account and look at the home screen. Just on this home page users are exposed to the news feed which contains every post made by every friend they have online, the message center so you can see who's online that you might want to chat with, advertisements on the right side of the screen, and not to mention all the links that allow you to change your picture, information, and status on your profile. From this one page a viewer can see pictures of his cousin's vacation to Jamaica, be instant messaging with his friend that goes to school in Oklahoma, and update his interests section of his profile. Now if that's not information overload then I don't know what is.
I hate how much time is used for commercials. I watch the shows online most of the time because they have less commercials.
ReplyDeleteYou make a good point, and the scary part is how much of this information we are actually absorbing and retaining. I mean a lot of the time you can start singing some catchy jingle and the people around you will already know the words to it. Just imagine if we occupied our brains with useful things, like logical fallacies.
ReplyDeleteYou make a good point about how we are exposed to so much information practically everywhere we go. The thing that scares me is that as we read or hear this new information, is old information that is stored in our heads being pushed out? Because if that is the case then we are actually losing intelligence from television commercials.
ReplyDeleteI love how this is set up, because you could literally talk about anything in our lives and it would pertain to this overload of information. It would be an extremely hard task to avoid being introduced to new things constantly in our lives, and honestly somewhat impossible.
ReplyDeleteOverload is something that you rarely think about. At least you do not think about it in that word. A lot of information is out there and we retain a lot of it without even knowing. Like "GotEnglish" said about a jingle and how the people are able to recognize the melody of it. Also I think that commercials are unnecessary but it is the only way that it bring in money sometimes for that website. It is like the newspapers, the only reason they are still around its because of the Ads in them. I guess we filter the commercials and Ads by what we are interested in.
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