Information Abundance Leads To More Distraction

At 9 am this morning, I opened my notebook and logged into my facebook account. As usual, I scrolled my facebook wall to check if there are any important news and updates. After reading few headlines, I stumbled on an article that caught my attention. It was about how we are increasingly getting too attached to our mobile devices. It was titled ‘We Are Hopelessly Hooked.’ I spent few minutes reading this article and found it very interesting, and decided to share it with my friend, who shares same interest. Before I even shared this article, I found myself reading another interesting article. Minutes later another article. And another. And again another article. I kept clicking links after links and reading every single one of them until I realized that I have not shared my first article to my friend. This has happened to me several times and I thought it was just normal to be distracted for few minutes or even hours. At least, I thought, I was reading something useful and educational. 

But, it is not okay to be distracted every time you see an article, and wasting a lot of your time clicking links after links. The problem is created due to abundance of information on internet. Every single day publishers, bloggers and people like us create thousands of content and upload on internet. Thus, content keeps getting bigger and information becomes abundance. So should we stop consuming information then? Or stop publishing? Of course not! The content creation will never stop as it is human nature to want to express their opinion, ideas and knowledge. Internet is a vehicle for them to transport their knowledge to other people. Content creation will exist as long as human race exists. So stop consuming information? Nope! That will only make matter worse. Without information to feed, people will be no different than animals. What differentiates human from animals is our knowledge, and curiosity to learn things around us. We are knowledge seekers by nature. We are always curious to know what we don’t know. And we try new things all the time. The fire was invented because of curiosity. Buddhism was born because of Siddhartha’s curiosity to know about sufferings. Christopher Columbus discovered America because of his curiosity to explore continents. There are many other great examples in history that proves we are curious and knowledge seekers by nature. There is no way we can stop consuming information or creating one. Again, what can we do to stop ourselves from information distraction? The only way I see is by controlling ourselves from consuming lot of information. We need to limit ourselves! Of course knowledge is power, but when there are too many information around us, it is difficult to know which one is the best. When there are hundred choices to choose from and only one best option, there is no doubt you will make a wrong decision. The only way to not get distracted from information abundance is self-control. I repeat self-control!

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