It’s hard to imagine how different life was two hundred years ago. The telegraph had not yet been invented. Information only travelled as fast as the person who carried it, and it was valued in proportion to how far it had to be transported. Local news was abundant and travelled quickly, and it usually directly affected those who heard it. On the other hand, news coming from the East Coast to the Midwest was slow, but if it was worth making the trip then it probably also affected the recipients in some way.

Today, information is so easily transported that it has almost no value at all. I can turn on the television and hear about foreign elections, trainwreck celebrities, collapsed mineshafts, topsoil erosion, and dozens of other things that are happening right now; and while some of these news items are very serious, they won’t change what I plan to do with my day.

In his prophetic book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman describes an idea called the information-action ratio, which is a measurement of the correlation between the things we learn and the things we do. He argues that with the technological advancements in the past 150 years—the telegraph, the telephone, and the television—this ratio has changed drastically. (The Internet was still about ten years away when he wrote the book, but it’s probably had a bigger effect than the other three combined.) We now know a lot more about what goes on in the world, and we do much less with what we know.

Information has become just another commodity in a capitalist system, and it must compete to get our attention. Most of the information that is delivered to us via headlines, blog posts, or the evening news had to fight to get there. As a result, most interesting has replaced most useful as the measure of the value of information—not what’s worth knowing, but what will get the most viewers or mouse clicks. This is paradoxically both the effect and the cause of the imbalanced information-action ratio.

We are told that as responsible citizens, it’s good to be informed. And this is true to the extent that the information affects what we do or how we live. But I’ll go on record as saying that it is not good to be too informed. Information that doesn’t affect our actions is worthless, and there are much more important things that God would have us fill our minds with than the endless cycle of novelty.

For my own part—we don’t own a television or subscribe to the newspaper, and I wrote a custom Firefox extension to hide the news headlines from Yahoo Mail. I just couldn’t handle it anymore. My working theory is that any news that’s important enough for me to act on will find its way to me some way or another, and that’s proven accurate in the last six months since I started limiting my information intake.

I mention this not because I want to sound superior to anyone, but because I thought it was important to show that all of the above information actually has affected my actions. Other people probably deal with information differently than I do, and these extremes may not be necessary, but this is how I decided to attack the problem of infomation overload.