Information Rich & Attention Poor

"It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information."
"In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody."
---- Oscar Wilde (1894)

"Information 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"
----Herbert Simon (1971)

成本比较：信息/人的注意力
若用经济指标来量化估算，半个世纪以来，这一比值大约增加了1千万倍（其中信息成本用数据的处理、传输、储存耗费衡量，人的注意力成本用平均工资衡量）。信息如何泛滥贬值，注意力如何稀缺珍贵，可见一斑。

Today, our competitive edge is no longer solely based on whether information is available, but rather on our ability to navigate through this flood of high speed data: to select, access, use, and respond to that which is most relevant.
----Stefania Lucchetti  The Principle of Relevance: The Essential Strategy to Navigate Through the Information Age(2011)