COMMENTARY: This is really important. No, really.

(UNDATED) It happened two weeks ago — Information Overload Awareness Day — but I missed it. Too much information got in the way, I guess. But it isn’t too late to worry about the estimated $900 billion that “information overload” costs the U.S. economy each year, or to spend $898.50 on the event sponsors’ “Information […]

(UNDATED) It happened two weeks ago — Information Overload Awareness Day — but I missed it. Too much information got in the way, I guess.

But it isn’t too late to worry about the estimated $900 billion that “information overload” costs the U.S. economy each year, or to spend $898.50 on the event sponsors’ “Information Overload Report Library.”

Each 24 hours brings us an estimated 1 billion new Web pages, 100 billion e-mails (94 percent of them spam), 1,000 new books, and individual exposure to 3,000 advertisements. No wonder futurist Alvin Toffler warned of “information overload.”


The good news is that a problem created by technology is a problem that can also be addressed by technology. Spam filters can protect your inbox. TV viewers use “mute” buttons and recording devices to skip over ads. Savvy teenagers turn to text messaging to escape the bloat of e-mail and social networking.

The bad news, however, is that we are left with a knottier dilemma. I’ll call it “Importance Overload.”

This is the noise of causes, alarms, alerts, “critical issues,” “defining moments,” “lines in the sand,” “end-of-civilization” events, and “blasphemies” that swarm about us like so many threatening hornets.

Bombs explode in Baghdad. Students gun down their classmates. Real estate gyrates. Health reform spawns shouting matches. Rigged elections proliferate. Nuclear weapons proliferate. Drug-resistant diseases proliferate. Deadly drugs proliferate. Unemployment rises — and on it goes, each matter important, until we gag.

Newspapers do some helpful triage by sorting through the day’s events and suggesting which few deserve our attention at breakfast. But then we face a 24-hour television news cycle, CNN’s hyperactive screen, e-mail news feeds and messages warning of “terror alerts” at airports and “suspicious packages” in subways.

With so much deemed “important,” it’s tempting to tune out all of the noise and decide that nothing is important. We pull up the drawbridge and live indoors. We retreat into entertainment and sports.


As we work through importance overload, we become vulnerable to zealots and demagogues.

Zealots focus all of their energy on a single cause. When no one else can match their laser-beam intensity, they often prevail. Too late, people discover that they should have cared more, for now something truly important has been lost.

Demagogues, meanwhile, use outright lies, half-truths, false authority, fake problems, demonization, phony enemies and emotionalism to flood the public square with noise and dread. They derail mature deliberation by wearing down the interested, scaring off the timid, and making it easier to be a spectator than a participant.

In the religious world that I watch closely, partisans on sexuality issues have focused so much intensity on this one issue that it seems, as Metallica sang in 1991, “nothing else matters.” Any attempt to move on to other concerns — mission work, community building, recruiting members, transforming lives, dealing with inherited facilities — gets dragged relentlessly back to sexuality debates.

Importance overload, though made worse by technology, is ultimately a human problem. Some people will do anything to win, and others will do anything to avoid the discomfort of complexity, ambiguity, perspective and conflict.

This should be the faith community’s province because, after all, we dedicate ourselves to the important things of life. But before we can help people deal with meaning and values, we need to dial down our own noise and uncompromising zealotry. We need to seek discernment, perhaps even in silence, and promote conversation, not siege warfare.

(Tom Ehrich is a writer, church consultant and Episcopal priest based in New York. He is the author of “Just Wondering, Jesus,” and the founder of the Church Wellness Project, http://www.churchwellness.com. His Web site is http://www.morningwalkmedia.com.)


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