Is information overload derailing the human project?

It could fairly be said that many of these national entities function within their own separate but not isolated domains, rather like large corporations do however, globalization is binding our disparate societies through trade, migration, economics, sciences, legal and political allegiances.

At the very least if not binding, we are creating cross dependencies between the other domains across nations, industries, societies and treaties.

If this level of complexity is only partly true, then the management of our societies is facing the rapid assimilation of multiple and constantly changing information entities on a monumental scale, and not converting much into Knowledge. We are not producing the right "cakes"(solutions).

Computers offer little to ease this burden. As we grow networking and increase the power of servers, we still define the decisions we hand to computers as algorithms and modeling. But we forget that these developed by humans who are trying to "describe" our human issues to a computer.

Algorithms simply freeze a certain set of decision criteria in time and we all know what happens when the parameters go beyond the algorithm, the computers and often the networks crash, alternatively and far more dangerous, they come up with the wrong answer.

Our species has developed many skills in communications (grunts to satellites), travel (reed boats to space ships) not to mention science, medicine, technology, arts and social development.

At the same time we see millions of humans die each year through the simple lack of food and water. The difference between our achievements at the top end of the spectrum and our under achievements at the bottom end is perhaps a measure of our failure to convert Information into the Knowledge of solutions.

The volume of unresolved issues within every society and globally is monumental. Is this because we are failing to cope, are we living in information silo's in order to avoid being swamped?

This is a global phenomenon, but it is bound to impact individuals, causing distress, confusion and the feeling of being disenfranchised. Could this be one of the key drivers of what has been described as our toxic society? Could this explain why some who are information rich can take legal and illegal advantage of others?

Each group, society and nation seeks to lay blame on our various leaders, perhaps we fail to acknowledge the possibility they are just as confused and consequentially just as dysfunctional as the rest of us.

We no longer understand why we are uneasy with our world and leap to simplistic solutions. We are adopting ever more radical mantra's to distance ourselves from the pain of not knowing how the world is really working.

Individual energy in all societies is increasingly focused on survival, disseminating so much information is just too hard. As a means of dealing with this we are increasingly adopting a "position" on various key issues and sticking with them to defend against the Information deluge.

In order to "defend" these positions we rely on self referential networks to supply a constant stream of affirmation. This has become polarizing, vexatious and divisive within our communities as these adopted perspectives clash.

If any one element of human distress is more global, uniform, obvious and consistent, it has to be the struggle to assimilate Information and its conversion into useful Knowledge, either for self preservation or for the benefit of all humans.