My all-time favorite social critic is NYU Professor Neil Postman. I recently rediscovered his thought-provoking book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. I want to share his take on information overload:
In the United States, we have 260,000 billboards; 11,250 newspapers; 11,556 periodicals; 27,000 video outlets for renting video tapes; more than 500 million radios; and more than 100 million computers. Ninety-eight percent of American homes have a television set; more than half our homes have more than one. There are 40,000 new book titles published every year (300,000 worldwide), and every day in America 41 million photographs are taken. And if this is not enough, more than 60 billion pieces of junk mail (thanks to computer technology) find their way into our mail-boxes every year.
From millions of sources all over the globe, through every possible channel and medium — light waves, airwaves, ticker tapes, computer banks, telephone wires, television cables, satellites, printing presses — information pours in. Behind it, in every imaginable form of storage — on paper, on video and audio tape, on discs, film, and silicon chips — is an ever greater volume of information waiting to be retrieved. Like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, we are awash in information. And all the sorcerer has left us is a broom.
Information has become a form of garbage, not only incapable of answering the most fundamental human questions but barely useful in providing coherent direction to the solution of even mundane problems. To say it still another way: The milieu in which Technopoly flourishes is one in which the tie between information and human purpose has been severed, i.e., information appears indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, in enormous volume and at high speeds, and disconnected from theory, meaning, or purpose.
All of this has called into being a new world. I have referred to it elsewhere as a peek-a-boo world, where now this event, now that, pops into view for a moment, then vanishes again. It is an improbable world. It is a world in which the idea of human progress, as Bacon expressed it, has been replaced by the idea of technological progress. The aim is not to reduce ignorance, superstition, and suffering but to accommodate ourselves to the requirements of new technologies. We tell ourselves, of course, that such accomodations will lead to a better life, but that is only the rhetorical residue of a vanishing technocracy.
We are a culture consuming itself with information, and many of us do not even wonder how to control the process. We proceed under the assumption that information is our friend, believing that cultures may suffer grievously from a lack of information, which, of course, they do. It is only now beginning to be understood that cultures may also suffer grievously from information glut, information without meaning, information without control mechanisms.
The late Dr. Postman published those words in 1992, before most people had even heard of the World Wide Web. The more things change . . .
TMI (Too Much Information) 
It’s very interesting. I think an [over]abundance of information favours people who are skilled at organizing large reams of data/information, to put to some actual use. For the average person it is probably more of a hindrance. I am noticing people’s inability to sort through even basic issues like nutrition, given the sheer volume of pseudo-scientific garbage being thrown at them daily on websites and by marketing/diet “gurus”. They have extremely muddled ideas about diet/nutrition. The problem is that lots of information is wonderful to have ▬ but you have to put that into some sort of coherent framework. I think your average person doesn’t really have the technical/organizational skill to do that. It’s a very interesting problem, though.