I was wondering if anyone has tried measuring and tracking their “attention saturation” (how much information I consume over the course of the day, and how much of it is useless), and “information pollution” (how much data/information I produce, and how much of it is just a noise and thus, simply “pollutes” the attention-sphere of other people)?
I would like to start with online information input/output for now, because it is easier to track passively.
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This is a really interesting metric to measure in our age of information overload.
I haven’t tried it yet, but if I were to do this, I would just periodically mine my chrome history.
If you’re using windows, go to
%UserProfile%\AppData\Local\google\chrome\User Data\Default
and you can see several “history” files there. These are actually sqlite databases that you can open and run queries against.
Use something like SQLite Manger for firefox if you want to see what’s in there (you may have to copy the file elsewhere and rename it with the extension .sqlite for it to be recognized)
There is actually a scary, almost paranoia invoking amount of information on there. Everything from every file you download, what search terms you use, number of times you visit a certain url to number of key strokes per website!
Now categorizing all of these urls as useful vs useless is the tricky part. Something broad like Email = useful, Reddit = useless wouldn’t work perfectly since there’s also a lot of useless mail as well as useful reddit posts.