There has been a rapid shift in today’s media landscape due to the large volume of media—and now AI-generated content—bombarding us with too much information (TMI), which can lead to passivity and tuning out and even great misconceptions. This increases the pace of life and decreases face-to-face social interaction. Loneliness has become very common. Isolation from real human interaction has poor health consequences. Mental illness is increasing, especially among younger Americans with high screen time. Globally, people spend close to half of their waking hours looking at screens.

This leaves people with little or no time to read. Readers think and thinkers read. My college students go through each day without using paper, and while this may save trees, it leads to remembering and thinking less.

People are losing the art of writing. Saving old correspondence used to be a way of archiving the past. Today, computers and phones can store terabytes of information, text, photos, and sounds, which may not last for future generations.

We find ancient papyruses that have been preserved for thousands of years. Then came libraries of printed material that have been around for half a millennium.

There is a long history of information preservation but today’s information overload is terrifying.

Today, we mostly rely on storing information digitally in ways that lack permanence—as there is no long-term standard for archiving digital content. The advent of computers, such as the ENIAC in 1945, brought us into the modern era. The original device weighed 30 tons and used 18,000 vacuum tubes, as the transistor wasn’t yet invented. ENIAC couldn’t store much information.

As a college student in 1964, I worked on a computer Fortran program to analyze tracks in bubble chambers, devices that displayed sub-atomic particle collisions. The program was stored on three boxes of IBM punch cards, each card measuring almost 8 by 3.5 inches and the container box about 24 inches long. Each day, I would make changes in the program and submit the three boxes to be run on an IBM mainframe computer that took up a whole air-conditioned room containing cabinets with reels of spinning magnetic tape. I would get a printout the next morning to puzzle over.

The personal computer debuted in the 1970s and was popular with hobbyists. Storage was on 5.25 inch floppy discs. The 1984 Macintosh led to putting data on 3.5 inch discs encased in hard plastic. Then, hard drives allowed increased storage capacity. This was followed by the thumb drive and other small storage devices with ever increasing room for data, and many more ways of storage followed increasing computer processor speeds. Today’s devices are becoming more rather than less complicated to use—and exercise increasing control over our lives. One spends more time trying to keep track of information than using it. There is no easy way out.

With each change of computing technology, data or information had to be left behind or transferred to the new medium. There is no end in sight. We can expect tremendous loss of what passes as knowledge.

The same goes for the internet, which allows phenomenal access to various forms of information, much of which is evanescent: here today, gone tomorrow. In my work, I expect websites to be ephemeral; I archive what I think will be necessary material on my computer’s hard drive. I still have shelves of books, filing cabinets of printed material, and other physical information storage. What about the visual realm? What to do with it all?

I got my first film camera 70 years ago. In 1963, I purchased a 35mm camera. I accumulated many boxes of slides which still sit in their original yellow boxes in my basement. After 1995, I switched to a digital camera. Eventually, I scanned selected slides to add to the digital images stored in my computer. After acquiring a smartphone in 2015, the old photo gear was retired. I have way more images than I can ever sort and organize effectively. But I try, and I try, and I…. “But I don’t get no satisfaction”, as the ‘Stones sang.

As a youth, you may remember going to movie theaters. One was across the street from where I lived in the 1950s. Saturday cartoons were a big hit. We acquired a television in 1953 and were exposed to limited programming, as there were few TV networks. Most of us were exposed to similar news and analysis. Then, cable TV followed offering many more choices. I stopped watching TV in 1966 after I realized how television commercials would enhance my consumption of advertised products.

The video disc appeared in the 1970s so one could screen movies at home. This led to video tape cassettes birthing the business of renting blockbusters to be viewed on a VCR at home. Then DVDs rented by Netflix. Now streaming offers almost endless choices for bringing on distractions of any imaginable kind.

Audio technology has evolved similarly. Music was something that individuals and groups performed and has been present almost for as long as we have lived on planet Earth. One either performed or listened, typically with others. It was improvised like jazz today but eventually music could be annotated or written down and shared. Very different musical styles evolved around the world. Western classical music was dominated by the advent of records played on a turntable, ending up with long play records that become popular in the 1950s. This led to high fidelity sound systems present in many homes. Soundscapes produced easily listening music in stores, termed Muzak, that enhanced sales. People carried portable music players with speakers as well as boom-boxes to the streets where many could either listen and enjoy or be exposed to unwanted noise. The Walkman made music listening a solitary pursuit and led to the iPod. Compact Discs supplanted records, and with the advent of mp3s and other forms of easily stored digital music files, one could amass a huge virtual sound library. You can now use the internet to provide whatever sounds you desire including from streaming services with huge collections.

Endless repetition used to work well in getting Americans to believe something the government said was true. In 2003, most Americans believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction because this was constantly repeated by the federal government, despite there being no such evidence. The U.S. invaded Iraq—at great cost of lives and resources—and no weapons were found. Repeating a lie used to work. Today, as truth decay is rampant, there are too many ways of spreading misinformation for most people to believe the same thing.

The Internet birthed social media in its various forms allowing self-expression. This has resulted in endless misinformation, disinformation, false facts, and deep fakes. If you can imagine anything possible or impossible, you’ll find validation there. The result: a large proportion of Americans believe the sun orbits the earth, and many millennials think the earth is flat. Few believe in evolution. The current attacks on science have found fertile ground.

Along came video games to soak up any remaining awake hours. Ralph Nader calls children’s electronic video games child molesters.

There is a trillion-dollar industry marketing to children because reaching them in their early childhood years enhances earnings over a lifetime and parents like to spend on their children. Older folk may respond to TMI by buying something–a.k.a.retail therapy–in the hopes of getting some relief.

Some call the extraction of money from today’s overload plague as “human fracking of the mind” (or “fracking the human mind”). Petroleum frackers pump high pressure and high-volume detergents into the ground to force monetizable black gold (oil) to the surface. Similarly, human frackers pump too much addictive information of little value to disrupt our minds. These frackers extract our personal data–often selling this directly to advertisers, and they get us to purchase. What the frackers also get is our attention, namely our eyes on the screens, that diminishes our ability to think and to respond to what is happening around us.

Just as with fracking of the Earth, we have a new gold rush into our inner psyche— through eyes on screens—that can lead to insidious destruction. Life in the age of rage goes on at an ever-furious pace and we lose the ability to care, to think, and to reach out to one another. Human fracking is a world-spanning land-grab into our consciousness.

There has been a huge splintering of ways to channel our attention by expressing ourselves on social media. Social media is now mostly anti-social. Instead of people working together on common causes, we can anonymously bash other people and seemingly get pleasure, perhaps even causing considerable harm to others. Watching a live event on the internet with caustic comments spewing forth in the chat does not provide relief to anyone.

What can be done to deal with too much information or cognitive overload or what some have called “infobesity”, or “infoxication”?

There are expensive resorts where access to the internet and its distractions are not possible. But these are not options for most of us.

AI generated output is advancing rapidly, already with nefarious consequences. Is this just another crisis to be added to so many others out there today? Or is it the ultimate apocalypse? Even among those who don’t agree about anything, many concur that something is totally wrong in a world where so many spend so much time scrolling endlessly through algorithmic feeds on social media. What to do?

Reclaim our attention? Call it attensity. Do not multi-task. Limit your exposure to speeding technology. Slow down. Become an attention activist or Homo attentus.

Academic reviews mostly focus on individual or institutional efforts. However, individual actions of trying to curtail the onslaught of the information torrent won’t deal with the global problem. Since the problem begins early in life some countries, such as Australia and France, are banning social media use by those under age 16. Schools try to limit or prohibit devices in classrooms. As huge profits await those who can seize our attention, expect progress to be slow.

Governments and societies can tackle frackers by implementing national data minimization frameworks, deploying AI-driven filtering and summarization tools, as well as updating public education curricula to teach media literacy and critical thinking, together with advancing open-data transparency initiatives. But, any of this will clash with capitalism’s endless drive for profits. In today’s turbulent world, such tactics present big challenges. But the alternative is either Huxley’s Brave New World—a society controlled by pleasure, distraction and consumerism—or Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four – dictatorship that controls through pain, fear and scarcity.

To go beyond, recognize that the power of the people is greater than that of the people in power. Power can be taken, but is not given. The process of taking is empowerment in itself. Let’s keep our minds safe from the frackers.