The “Poverty of Attention” at Trial
On a recent Armchair Expert podcast, host Dax Shepard paraphrased a quote by Herbert Simon, the gist being “…a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention…” Wanting to get the quote just right, I looked it up and while the simple paraphrase is fantastic, there are too many gems in the full quote to not repeat it here: “In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information