Is information flowing too quickly?

Imagine (or remember) a world where information cannot travel almost instantly, where there is a friction associated to sending/ receiving this information. How would you like it?

Personally, I believe that this place adapts better to our biology, our brains take a time to process information that nowadays we are rarely willing to spend. Everything today is immediate, one hour equates to two hundred and fifty reels, a hundred messages or thousands of lines of agentic code. This speed is so unnatural to our anatomy that we cannot even comprehend it. After this hour we don’t remember more than one or two of the reels, forgot about what we said in the messages, or completely ignore the contents of the codebase.

I don’t like the feeling of the world speeding by, of time escaping, of chasing experiences before it is too late. I think life today has been sped up to a point beyond recognition, and I refuse to accept it. I think life becomes nicer once you take the time to appreciate it. Maybe you don’t get to do as much stuff as that ultra-productive nineteen year-old tiktoker, but frankly I don’t care. I want to look back at the moments that I lived with the feeling that I was present, and dedicating the time that the situation demanded of me, not rushing from one thing to the other. So whenever possible, I’ll be spending my mornings with a tea by my side, a good book and a nice view, oscillating between reading, gathering or just being there, thinking. Also, I think that the capacity to be with oneself is an underestimated ability that is slowly getting lost.

A lot of people nowadays need constant entertainment, they no longer know how to behave when no avalanche of dopamine is present. Stuck on a queue for two minutes at a coffee shop? just scroll some reels, having to wait at the doctors office? just scroll some reels, leave work early? go back home and scroll some reels. It is depressing to know that Netflix purposely makes the plots of its original films predictable because it assumes that a big deal of the audience is going to scroll while watching it. This is plain sad, where are the social apes who developed language to communicate with one another? Wouldn’t it be nicer if the situation was the following. Stuck on a queue two minutes at a coffee shop? discuss the coffee shop assortment with the person in front of you, having to wait at the doctors office? watch other people trying to guess their condition or familiar dynamics, leave work early? get home and spend some time in the garden taking care of your vegetables.

I can attribute part of this to the speed with which we can now transmit information. For a lot of years the faster way of exchanging information was through talking, as we could be exchanging one hundred and sixty words every minute, also reading was a very nice way of exchanging information with speeds over three hundred words per minute. But nowadays, the amount of information that we can transmit is much higher, or at least it appears so, we can watch a fifteen second youtube short about some random topic, and then switch to some other completely unrelated twelve second video. This makes us think that we have consumed twenty seven seconds of video, and each second being sixty frames and each frame being a thousand words we would have received one million six hundred twenty thousand words in just twenty seven seconds! But this number is not real, because we have not digested even a small portion of these, while we digest almost the totality of the words that we read/ listen to.

Another example could be the way we search stuff online. Nowadays there is no friction associated with doing searches, as internet speeds are on the hundreds of megabytes per second, so it is very easy to load a website, skim through it, decide whether or not it contains what we want (based on format, headers or some other bright box to catch your attention), and move to the next page to try our luck again, all this in the span of a few seconds. This is even worsened with generative AI, where we prompt something, skim through the answer and ask for further improvement until we get the exact answer that we need. There is almost no processing or work on our part, and this kills our critical thinking. I don’t say that we should look all stuff in an encyclopeadia, just that I’m glad about having spent hours in stack overflow when trying to fix my early (and recent) coding issues.

Yet another example is arguments. Historically a heated argument was something reserved for face to face interactions, as we could express each other quick enough so that the conversation could heat up. Nowadays we can achieve this also through instant messaging apps (just imagine getting to the same level of heat through conventional letters, why waste multiple days of your life waiting for a reply of something that you probably don’t even think). Having lost the privilege of physically being with the person we are arguing with is a very big deal. We are just getting angry in a room where we are sitting alone, with a plastic and glass device, it looks kind of distopian.

I believe that there are some actions that could be adopted in order to avoid this oversaturation of information, and most of them just consist on making the information slightly more expensive. This is the reason why I keep my phone always with a black and white filter, information becomes slightly harder to process, and this extra friction means that I get to look at the charts, maps, images with more attention than how I would do otherwise. Somehow it helps me be more conscious of the route that I follow using Maps, or the details of the picture that I’m looking at (instead of looking at it and automatically knowing that it is autumn by the brown leaves, you need to focus on the fallen ones). Also this strategy helps me perceive the world as more colorful, and being fascinated by the world is something we all should strive for.

An additional strategy would be creating a browser that only allows to check one website every minute or two. For some this could be inconvenient, but this way you would be motivated to read all the content on such website, and putting a bit of thought before writing the search. Just imagine if each website took ten minutes to load how much effort you would put into making sure that the website that you load is the one you need.

Finally, for me life it is not about the speed at which the information flows, but about the speed that we can digest it, and I believe that nowadays there is a big gap between the two. But as Londoners are used to hear, Mind the gap, as by minding it we can adapt our life to the latter speed, which just feels right.