Attention deficit or a constant?

People often argue that we have too much infor­ma­tion and too lit­tle atten­tion; that this is a con­di­tion of being “mod­ern.” But the opposite may be true: that atten­tion is a human con­stant and that it con­stantly seeks new forms. Where there’s “sur­plus atten­tion” we always come  up with things to occupy it. 

Was the past sim­pler, with less infor­ma­tion to dis­tract the mind and less to worry about? That can’t really be true: there’s nothing sim­ple about farm­ing and the nat­ural world is full of infor­ma­tion we’ve lost the capacity to discern.

This is an interesting thesis when you link the recent work in finance on information and attention. We are always trying to fill out attention with information. We generally are not overloaded with information. We can handle a lot.

However, Herbert Simon, the nobel prize winner in economics would say that we have become information rich and attention poor. Information computation transmission and storage has each increased multifold but our attention has stayed stable. We may have switched from depth to speed of acquiring information and knowledge. Knowledge may have moved from a "stock" to a "flow" concept. We consume information at a faster pace  regardless of quality.

The type of information could be the issue especially if it is new. The problem is whether there information is useful and can be processed correctly. This is the role for decision sciences.