If You Cannot Convince, then Distract!

50,000!!! That’s the number of thoughts per day that a human processes in its brain. Perhaps some may be repetitive and the average is 0.5 thoughts per second. Incredible!  This tiny brain that weighs around 3 pounds and has 75% water boasts of processing 50000 thoughts per day. I am not going to dissect the anatomy and the science behind the brain functioning here.  But, delve in to how information has overloaded the brain and distracts the mind. 

Roti, Kapada, Makaan (Food, Clothing , Shelter) has been the basic necessities of life. Adding to these necessities, there are many other things like TV, Web, apps, social networks, gadgets, mobile phones and many other things.  It is this addition of things to life that has made life sometimes feel miserable and sometimes feel connected.  Take the example of a news channel on TV, the news screen has at least 5 varieties of information and goes up to 10. The information includes Time, Channel Name, Breaking News, Just in News, Top Story, tickers that scrolls the news, important news schedule and stock prices and so on and so forth. The main news that the anchor is presenting is surrounded by these many information and your eyes and mind is always looking for additional information on the screen without your knowledge.

Let us look at the information on a social network site.  When you login to your page, you have recommended friends, the wall, trending topic, the news feed, sponsored ads, the groups, the pages etc. From an era of searching the information we have moved to an era of scrolling for information on these social networking sites. Amidst the scrolling, there is humongous amount of information that distracts you and deflects your purpose of visiting the site.

Let’s move to email. The relevant mail is not to be seen at all. You need to dig out the relevant mail amidst the marketing mails all around. New features are accommodated in mail boxes like social, updates, automated unsubscribe etc.  A recent article by muHive mentions the use of emails for marketing purpose is less useful.  But still people thrive on mass marketing whether it’s useful to the person or not. I just hate to see more ads or marketing mails in my mail box then real mails. 

Duplicity of information is another nuisance. The same information is posted on every other social network. Visit any site or blog there is an option, share on Facebook, twitter, pinterest, googleplus, and some pages have buttons from almost all social networks on the earth where you can share. And, it is quite annoying to read the same information since everyone is on every other social network. People share information that I have shared X information on Y network so please check. Irritating? The mantra is simple, push the information anywhere and everywhere because it’s easy and cost is almost zero!  It was interesting to see the purpose of social networks to connect people. Now, it has moved on to make people consume all sorts of information whether they like it or not. Another nuisance from these social networks is, automatically your profile gets created without even your knowledge! This is insane and furious!

The number of online accounts with separate credentials easily goes over 50 accounts for an individual. Managing this information is itself quite challenging. With the enormous amount of data that is generated on different mediums, the eyeballs that  screens through information easily surpasses over the number of thoughts per second which in turn means the brain has to process at a speed faster than the speed of thought. This is quite impossible and leads to deviate from your original thoughts.

Even Arjuna, hit the fish eye with his bow and arrow by looking at the reflection in water, would find it hard to navigate through the information. Earlier, we used to search for information, now information is being delivered to you whether you like it or not. The marketing personnel are going with the strategy of pushing the information with the motto, 'if you cannot convince, then distract' . For the user Call it information Overload, Redundant Information, people will be ignorant about Information and we are entering in to Information Ignorant World which can also be called as Attention Deficit Disorder :)