Neil Postman Quotes

[…] a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

We are drowning in information.

When information is infinite, individual pieces of information are worth nothing.

The Internet is, among other things, a massive, chaotic marketplace. Too much information, it turns out, is a lot like no information.

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: the attention of its recipients.

People today are in danger of drowning in information; but, because they have been taught that information is useful, they are more willing to drown than they need be. If they could handle information, they would not have to drown at all.

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

There is an explosion of information happening, yet people demand quick access to relevant content that cuts through the clutter.

There's so much information and journalism on television. We have too much to absorb.

I don't think we should have less information in the world. The information age has yielded great advances in medicine, agriculture, transportation and many other fields. But the problem is twofold. One, we are assaulted with more information than any one of us can handle. Two, beyond the overload, too much information often leads to bad decisions.

Technology has enabled an environment where information is constantly fed to us on a real-time basis. You can't slow the feed of information, nor would you want to, but you can control and organize your consumption.

Publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record.

Never before in human history has more bad information been available to more people.

When everybody has access to an avalanche of information, becoming a master thinker is very important in your life-long security.

The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it.

We are deluged with information. We have to process now three times as much data as we would have done 50 years ago. We're bombarded with tweets, with emails - a state of continuous disruption - and that's bad for our decision making and bad for our thinking.

We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge.

Information networks straddle the world. Nothing remains concealed. But the sheer volume of information dissolves the information. We are unable to take it all in.

In politics, information is superabundant—what is needed is judgement and selectivity in dealing with that information.

Even as the world becomes saturated with seemingly unlimited information, “the benefit that ought to come with having a variety of opinions” writes author Bill Bishop, “is lost to the righteousness that is the special entitlement of homogeneous groups.” The result is divisiveness, polarization, and rancor in our national discourse – First World tribalism – with crowds gathering at the poles of every issue.

It’s never been so easy to pretend to know so much without actually knowing anything. We pick topical, relevant bits from Facebook, Twitter or emailed news alerts, and then regurgitate them. […] What matters to us, awash in petabytes of data, is not necessarily having actually consumed this content firsthand but simply knowing that it exists — and having a position on it, being able to engage in the chatter *about* it. We come perilously close to performing a pastiche of knowledgeability that is really a new model of know-nothingness.

The Internet is the single biggest creator of ignorance mankind has ever created, as well as the single biggest eliminator of that ignorance. It’s our ability to filter that eliminates the former and empowers the latter.

Against Knowledge I have, as the light cynic observed of a certain lady's past, only one serious objection - that there is so much of it.

There's no such thing as information overload-only filter failure.