Managing Information and Comunication Overload
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Managing Information and Communication Overload

Is the constant crushing burden of information and communication overload dragging you down? By the end of your workday, do you feel overworked, overwhelmed, stressed, and exhausted? Would you like to be more focused, productive, and competitive, while remaining balanced and in control?

If you're continually facing too much information, too much paper, too many commitments, and too many demands, you need Breathing Space.


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Recommended Reading
Neil Postman: Amusing Ourselves to Death

Ben Bagdikian: The New Media Monopoly

Jeff Davidson: Complete Idiot's Guide to Getting Things Done

David Allen: Ready for Anything

Jim Cathcart: The Acorn Principle

Aldous Huxley: Brave New World

Kirsten Lagatree: Checklists for Life

Williams and Sawyer: Using Information Technology

Snead and Wycoff: To Do Doing Done

Larry Rosen and Michelle Weil: Technostress

Sam Horn: Conzentrate

John D. Drake: Downshifting

Don Aslett: Keeping Work Simple

Jeff Davidson: The 60 Second Organizer

Jeff Davidson: The 60 Second Procrastinator

Recommended Blogs


Managing Information and Communication Overload

Saturday, June 30, 2007

The Peek-a-Boo World

Professor Neil Postman in his 1985 landmark book Amusing Ourselves to Death offers a brilliant portrait of how television consistently offers us a false view of reality. Here is an excerpt from the start of Chapter 5, "The Peek-a-Boo World":

"Television has become, so to speak, the background radiation of the social and intellectual universe, the all-but-imperceptible residue of the electronic big bang of a century past, so familiar and so thoroughly integrated with American culture that we no longer hear its faint hissing in the background or see the flickering grey light. This, in turn, means that its epistemology goes largely unnoticed. And the peek-a-boo world it has constructed around us no longer seems even strange."

"There is no more disturbing consequence of the electronic and graphic revolution than this: that the world as given to us through television seems natural, not bizarre. For the loss of the sense of the strange is a sign of adjustment, and the extent to which we have adjusted is a measure of the extent to which we have changed. Our culture's adjustment to the epistemology of television is by now almost complete; we have so thoroughly accepted its definitions of truth, knowledge and reality that irrelevance seems to us to be filled with import, and incoherence seems eminently sane."

"It is my object in the rest of this book to make the epistemology of television visible again. I will try to demonstrate by concrete example... that television's conversations promote incoherence and triviality... and that television speaks in only one persistent voice — the voice of entertainment. Beyond that, I will try to demonstrate that to enter the great television conversation, one American cultural institution after another is learning to speak its terms."

"Television, in other words, is transforming our culture into one vast arena for show business. It is entirely possible, of course, that in the end we shall find that delightful, and decide we like it just fine. This is exactly what Aldous Huxley feared was coming, fifty years ago."

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Jeff Davidson, MBA, CMC, Executive Director -- Breathing Space Institute © 2010
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