Content overload: less is more
I started this blog at some point by writing about giving a million monkeys typewriters. Statistically speaking one of them should write a Shakespeare novel. I realize I’m one of those million monkeys adding content onto the internets. I even wrote a book, adding even more content. There’s so much information available that it seems to overwhelm people. We don’t read emails anymore and just ignore any piece of information that doesn’t fit in our mindset, mainly for convenience sake.
It’s understandable. Almost every job ad out there promises you the ability to become part of the or at least a “Winning team”, whatever that means. Another sign I saw the other day promised me the “Leading Chinese restaurant” – which turned out to be a food poisoning delivery service. Anyone can call themselves “leading” and “winning” – and as a result all these buzzwords have zero meaning anymore. So we ignore them.
Someone told me typewriters make you think about the words you choose more carefully, because you can’t erase them with the push of a button. It’s like photography. We don’t need film anymore, which required us to think before taking a picture. Now we just snap 3000 images on an average vacation and hope some work out. Many wedding and “professional” fauxtographers work that way.
So with content generation becoming easier every day, the quantity goes up, and the quality goes down. Society is inundated with content, and becomes numb to it. Stop the madness. Next time you take a picture or write a social media update – think about your composition. What are you trying to accomplish? And when you publish your updates and vacation pictures, do me a favour and pick your favourites before uploading. No one is really going to look through your 500 beach vacation images. Less really is more.