So the main risk information abundance poses is not that one’s attention will be occupied or used up by information, as though it were some finite, quantifiable resource, but rather that one will lose control over one’s attentional processes. In other words, the problems in Tetris arise not when you stack a brick in the wrong place (though this can contribute to problems down the line), but rather then you lose control of the ability to direct, rotate, and stack the bricks altogether.
It’s precisely in this area - the keeping or losing of control - where the personal and political challenges of information abundance, and attention scarcity, arise. To say that information abundance produces attention scarcity means that the problems we encounter are now less about breaking down barriers between us and information, and more about putting barriers in place. It means that the really important sort of censorship we ought to worry about pertains less to the management of information, and more to the management of attention.
Here’s the problem: Many of the systems we’ve developed to help guide our lives - system like news, education, law, advertising, and so on - arose in, and still assume, an environment of information scarcity. We’re only just beginning to explore what these systems should do for us, and how they need to change, in this new milieu of information abundance.
We call our time the Information Age, but I think a better name for it would be the “Age of Attention”. In the Age of Attention, digital technologies are uniquely poised to help us grapple with the new challenges we face - challenges which are, fundamentally, challenges of self-regulation.