In spite of information’s increased quantity and speed of transmission, modern people may feel as psychologist and philosopher William James did in 1899 that an “irremediable flatness is coming over the world.” Here, I do not mean to suggest that the world is becoming flat in Thomas Friedman’s sense of greater connectivity and a leveling of the global competitive playing field. Rather, flatness refers to an increasing banality and loss of meaning in life. Surprisingly, information overload produces not a heightened sense of stimulation and awareness but rather boredom and alienation. A creeping sameness or, at the other extreme, variation that approaches randomness causes the brain to shut down. This is what is known as information entropy: the degradation of information through monotonous repetition and meaningless variety. To illustrate how these opposites produce the same result, consider the average listener’s response to the minimalism of Philip Glass and the random dissonance of Arnold Schoenberg. Most people are put to sleep by the music of both composers but that is because in the case of Glass the repetition and slow pace of new information loses our attention, whereas the endless atonal variety in Schoenberg’s compositions comes across as simply random noise. What we find missing in both Glass and Schoenberg is significant variation or surprise. Monotony and boredom set in from too little or too much variety. Entropy, as loss of meaning and communication, always lurks at both ends of the continuum.

Just as energy and matter degrade over time to more probable and less informative states, the greater the flow and amount of information, the more likely it will degrade toward noise or sterile uniformity. People deluged by a flood of meaningless variety quickly reach a saturation point where, as a means of self-defense, they develop the capacity to tune most everything out and become extremely selective, jaded, blasé and callous. And people bombarded by redundant information come to view life as banal, colorless, insipid, boring and characterless.

how can we create meaning in this flood of information? how can we reduce the echo chambers? how can we sidestep hierarchy? how can we increase both fragmentation and responsibility? how can we democratize the flow of information?