Attention Saturation

Fred Wilson has a good post on attention saturation, with this marvelous quote from a cognitive psychologist in 1971:

"What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it." (Computers, Communications and the Public Interest, pages 40-41, Martin Greenberger, ed., The Johns Hopkins Press, 1971.)

He asks what number of feeds we can possibly tolerate.  The answer is about 150, the cognitive limit of our mental capacities to track social relationships.  Sure, we can have more sources of information.  But in abundance, we will rely on our social networks as the filter.  Good thing we keep passing the good stuff along so we can drop reading the rest.

The one counter trend I can come up with is media selection theory, where old media is never forgotten for the new.  I happen to disbelieve it when the cost of a media saturate itself, such as with spam in email.  This has yet to be proven out, of course, but at least has tipped the scale towards, say, feeds.