Brian Bergstein summarizes the results of a Pew survey on Americans’ comfort level with technology.
–Despite being plugged in to the Internet and other sources of data more often, only 13 percent of the tech-savvy crowd feels overwhelmed by information. By contrast, a sense of information overload plagues 25 percent of the rest of the population.
So why do the people who immerse themselves in information feel less besieged by it?
It could be that technology helps some people organize or take control of their lives, Horrigan said. Or maybe some are simply better at knowing “what to do and how to cope with the information that is flooding at them,” he said.
As for me, the big time savers/organizers have been online banking, email (duh!), online reference guides (no need for books), ordering things online from the library and being able to check my library records, not needing to subscribe to a newspaper (save money as well as the need to throw it away). On the other hand, I”m still obtaining books (especially technical books) like there’s no tomorrow, and I still waste a good bit of time uploading and downloading and backing things up. Also, I feel scared of having a disaster or of being a victim of identity theft. I buy almost no CD’s, but I end up burning an awful lot.
Leave a Reply