The problem with too much information

"The trouble is that information doesn’t nourish us... it turns out to be boring.... if there is an antidote to boredom, it is not information but meaning... Information is ... an undifferentiated stream of sense and nonsense ... the journey from information to meaning involves more than simply filtering the signal from the noise. It is an alchemical transformation... takes skill, time and effort, practice and patience.... If boredom has become a sickness in modern societies, this is because the knack of finding meaning is harder to come by... if the deep roots of boredom are in a lack of meaning... then the constant flow of information to which we are becoming habituated cannot deliver ... At best, it allows us to distract ourselves with the potentially endless deferral of clicking from one link to another. Yet sooner or later we wash up downstream in some far corner of the web, wondering where the time went... [that's] quite different to the patient, unpredictable process that leads towards meaning [which] requires, among other things, space for reflection – allowing what we have already absorbed to settle, waiting to see what patterns emerge." I guess this is why I spend time (almost) every morning processing useful and interesting articles, like this one, and putting them here - a sort of first draft and reflection of blog posts to come. And if journalism is the first draft of history, and blogs are the hasty draft of journalism, what does this make these posts? The digital equivalent of scribbled notes? - The problem with too much information – Dougald Hine – Aeon