From the New York Times, a piece about Predictably Irrational from Dan Ariely. I’m somewhat fascinated by the idea of our general preoccupation with holding on to things, particularly as it relates to retaining data (see previous posts referencing Facebook, Google, etc.)

Our natural tendency is to keep everything, in spite of the consequences. Storage capacity in the digital realm is only getting larger and cheaper (as its size in the physical realm continues to get smaller), which only seeks to feed off this tendency further. Perhaps this is also why more individuals don’t question Google claiming a right to keep messages from their Gmail account after the messages, or even the account, have been deleted.

Ariely’s book describes a set of experiments performed at M.I.T.:

[Students] played a computer game that paid real cash to look for money behind three doors on the screen… After they opened a door by clicking on it, each subsequent click earned a little money, with the sum varying each time.

As each player went through the 100 allotted clicks, he could switch rooms to search for higher payoffs, but each switch used up a click to open the new door. The best strategy was to quickly check out the three rooms and settle in the one with the highest rewards.

Even after students got the hang of the game by practicing it, they were flummoxed when a new visual feature was introduced. If they stayed out of any room, its door would start shrinking and eventually disappear.

They should have ignored those disappearing doors, but the students couldn’t. They wasted so many clicks rushing back to reopen doors that their earnings dropped 15 percent. Even when the penalties for switching grew stiffer — besides losing a click, the players had to pay a cash fee — the students kept losing money by frantically keeping all their doors open.

(Emphasis mine.) I originally came across the article via Mark Hurst, who adds:

I’ve said for a long time that the solution to information overload is to let the bits go: always look for ways to delete, defer, or otherwise avoid bits, so that the few that remain are more relevant and easier to handle. This is the core philosophy of Bit Literacy.

Put another way, do we need to take more personal responsibility for subjecting ourselves to the “information overload” that people so happily buzzword about? Is complaining about the overload really an issue of not doing enough spring cleaning at home?