No doubt, you know the experience of feeling constantly bombarded by a plethora of sources, opinions, facts, and fictions. I suggest we feel the burden of information more acutely due to our tendency to be individualistic. The weight of responsibility is more keenly placed on our minds because the responsibility is less diffused for the individualist.
Certainly, we are not the first in this quest for knowledge and understanding. Throughout history, humans have communicated their thoughts and ideas to others through various means, such as oral traditions, written texts, schools of thought, and institutions of learning.
These methods are the same as we use today. However, what is different today is the scale and speed of information production and dissemination. On top of that, there are more people than ever before, generating more information than ever before, at a faster rate than ever before. But as I mentioned earlier, I also think our worldview contributes to the way we manage the internal cognitive load of responsibility.
Perhaps an antidote to the burden of responsible information handling is not merely a technical matter (id est; learn to learn more faster and better), but also a matter of worldview and cultural management.
We are not mere individuals who are responsible for all the work of sifting through our thoughts, each one as it comes to us. We are part of a community that (could) be working toward this shared goal. So as I learn, I share. I’ve done the work so you don’t have to (at least not as much). Further, you’ve done the work of learning and figuring things out, and you share (thanks in advance).
We sort of do this already. Sort of. We choose our favourite news outlets, and we choose our favourite authors/publishers and podcast networks, and those we listen to at work or in our friend circles.
There is a sort of irony in the partial solution to individualism being grounded in individualism, but we are (at least in part) responsible for choosing those we listen to and those who will inevitably shape us. Put another way, we are responsible for choosing wisely those who will be in part responsible for shaping us.
Is there a hierarchy of importance regarding who carries more weight in our network of reasoning? I think so. Your local church should be a key community in shaping your thinking and bearing a good deal of the responsibility of information filtration. Primarily because you are physically present (actually in community), and you get to actually ‘watch’ their lives. In a globalized world, we fool ourselves when we think we see the lives of others across the world. We simply do not. But we can see if people’s ideas grow corn in their lives at our local community church because we are physically present, and we can see it grow (or not) and if its corn (or not).
Cultivating then a tighter and more trustworthy conversation partner with your local church about the avalanche of issues you are thinking about will be a good place to start when it comes to diffusing the burden of information management in your cognitively overloaded consciousness.
To this end, asking someone, “what have you been reading lately?” is a principal means to establishing who is in podium position to help carry that information load for you/with you.
In other mediums not necessarily imbodied face-to-face conversation, online conversation partners are good, but if we are talking about a hierarchy then a medium with which you may respond and give feedback and ask questions is surely closer to the bull’s retina than a mere news outlet. For example, blogs, or Substacks may be more conducive to this, especially the more personal and locally focused ones. Again, podcasts of that nature could equally fit the dollar bill. But interaction is better than incommunicado.
Too this end, it may be a noble endeavour to produce this yourself. You may say to yourself as many think to themselves, “but there’s so much information out there, its like a sea of noise. Who would want to add more to that?” but I think we think of all the information available in the wrong way when those thoughts get us. We are a globalised and interconnected world, in a sense. But really, we aren’t. we actually are distinct little communities. Hence, the opposite might be true. There is so much information out there that you can’t afford not to speak about it to your community because perhaps nobody else is doing that. Everyone else might be thinking it’s everyone else’s responsibility to manage that information themselves. But hopefully I’ve argued sufficiently against that stance already. So consider being that voice for your community or starting something like that or contributing to something like that. No doubt, you’d be the greatest beneficiary of such an endeavour.
Bigvai and Shiphrah 