Information overload reflects an excess of healthy curiosity

Evidence

There is always something to be seen or heard next to what we are looking at or listening to. The laments of discourses on information overload could turn easily into astonishment when confronted by the excedence of curiosity that occupies the human mind. So, the distraction for which the young are berated would bear witness to the deepest wellspring of attention: There is a fundamental opposition between two attitudes, the one consists in inflecting perception in the direction of some anticipation, the other in seeking an innocence in the eye and the senses, in an opening of spirit, a welcoming of the other as other. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 542

Categorization

• XREF: Directly reverses standard critiques of attention capture — a counterpoint to Wu’s ‘attention merchants’ and the overload literature. — connects to: Curiosity is a market-produced deformation, not a universal human trait — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 126; The dot.com crash was caused by nervous-system strain from information overload — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 452

Broader Connections

• Curiosity is a market-produced deformation, not a universal human trait #qualifies (0.80) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 126