The Bottleneck Is Not Information But Attention
We do not suffer from a shortage of information. We suffer from a shortage of the sustained attention required to do anything meaningful with it.
"The packaging of intellectual positions and views is one of the most active enterprises of some of the best minds of our day. The viewer of television, the listener to radio, the reader of magazines, is presented with a whole complex of elements to make it easy for him to 'make up his own mind' with the minimum of difficulty and effort." Mortimer Adler & Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book
Adler and Van Doren wrote this decades before the internet, but their observation has only become more acute. The modern information environment is designed to package opinions so efficiently that the consumer never has to think. You do not form a view; you install one, "somewhat like inserting a cassette into a cassette player." The bottleneck in intellectual life was never access to information it was always the willingness to attend to it deeply enough to understand it.
Mikics makes the same case from the reader's side: "We are primed to scan and skim, to get the gist of an opinion and move on." The digital environment trains a specific cognitive habit rapid assessment and disposal that is antithetical to the kind of sustained engagement that produces understanding. Every app on your phone is optimized for one metric: time spent. Not time spent understanding. Not time spent thinking. Just time spent.
Nielsen provides a counterexample in his deep reading practice: making multiple passes over a paper, Ankifying as he goes, spending days on a single article. This is profoundly countercultural. He treats attention as the scarce resource it is and allocates it deliberately, rather than letting the environment dictate where it goes. The result is not just better memory but better thinking "fluid access to memory is at the foundation of so much creative thought."
Takeaway: In an age of infinite information, the competitive advantage belongs to whoever can sustain attention long enough to actually think.
See also: Digital Consumption Is the Enemy of Depth | Slow Reading Is an Act of Resistance | Deep Work Requires Eliminating Shallow Work | Problem Selling Bundles Solvable Issues Into Impossible Ones