For a long time, consumer educators believed that people make the best choices when they have plenty of information. Consumer education programs taught us how to locate information so we had enough to make good decisions.
That was before the Internet.
These days, the challenge is not in finding information. It’s in learning how to manage an over-abundance of it. There are two issues here:
- Discerning what has integrity in a medium without gatekeepers, one in which anyone can say and publish whatever they want to.
- Coping with the volume so that we don’t shut down from information overload.
A previous post featured Dr. Barry Schwartz speaking about the paradox of choice. His research discovered that people actually make worse decisions when overloaded with information and choices. Continue reading
