Below The Fold

Have you ever heard of paralysis of analysis?
I got the term from my Pops, who discusses it in his upcoming book about the process of decision making for managers. Paralysis of analysis occurs when, in a decision-making process, there is too much information to be sorted through. Having too much information stymies the decision maker and prevents him from being able to make a timely, and often an effective, decision.
Wikipedia has a decent definition and brief discussion about the phenomena.
Today, I sat and stared at my computer for several seconds. My RSS news feed numbered somewhere over 400, and I hadn’t even pulled up BoingBoing.net or Drudge or Fark. I think I suffered with a bout of analysis paralysis.
And then I thought about life before the Internet. I remembered doing research in libraries, navigating the dewey decimal system and making copies of pages of old reference texts. I remembered surfing newspaper archives with Microfiche, looking through one page at a time, headline by headline until I found what I was looking for. A google was an impossibly large number. Yahoo was the psuedonym adopted by hack actor Greg Pead.
And suddenly, I got it. I understood how my parents’ generation could be nostalgic about things like carburetors and typewriters and mimeographs and rotary dial telephones.
Somehow, in all the websites and messageboards and blogs and torrents, I think humanity is disappearing. And if not disappearing, certainly morphing.
I know change and evolution are inevitable. And I know that every time mankind takes a step forward, there’s a voice in the back of the room screaming how it’s another step toward damnation. It’s a freakin’ cliche, already.
But is that voice ever right? What happens when the sky actually does fall? Is Chicken Little lauded or lynched then?