Regarding the information explosion in the contemporary epoch of, the late Fazlur Rahman, Muslim scholar and scientist, remarked: “Physical avenues of information may improve vastly but the heart, the instrument of perception and discernment, is dulled.”
Written in the late 1980’s, his Major Themes of the Qur’an noted that “The inputs and outputs of computers become ever more efficient; only the capacity to ask the right questions, the humanly relevant questions, fails.”
Indeed, the present-day issues of information overload must be evaluated in light of the Divine warning against those who “know but the outer surface of this world’s life, whereas they are heedless of the ultimate things,” referring to the inner reality of this world’s life as well as the final reality of the hereafter (see the Qur’an, for example, al-Rum, 30:7).
A study by the University of California, Berkeley approximates that for each person, nearly 800 Megabytes of stored information are produced per annum, which is equivalent to 400,000 pages. In the meantime, every year, 300,000 books are published; while internet websites are increasing in numbers (there were over 108 million distinct ones in February of 2007).
Symptomatic of information overload is what has been termed by sociological researchers as “information anxiety”, a persistent feeling that one should perfectly know more than one does, even though perfect pieces of information are always vaguely elusive. Hence, for many people, time is wasted for meaningless emails, television programmes, internet and paperworks.
Some research, such as the one carried out by William Van Winkle, has even found a correlation between information overload and damaged physical health, particularly decreased vision and cardiovascular stress.
In other cases, due to their being overwhelmed and left with the loss of control over the massive amounts of information, some people vent their frustrations and anger on others, so much so that personal relationships are damaged.
And for some others, there is a problem of inefficiency. It is partly due to their being unfamiliar with information and communication technology, as well as the volume of information. Ironically, it is computer systems which have all the time been blamed for their personal inefficiency.
Overconfident in the reliability of their information sources, some people commit error as a result of bad judgement. Yet for some others, there is an opposite problem, one of “paralysis by analysis” as they are not able to discern reality and truth from fact in the midst of massive units of information.
Almost two decades ago, the social critic Neil Postman, in his speech to the German Informatics Society titled “Informing Ourselves to Death” lamented that present-day emphasis is out and out on harnessing human talent and energy towards the development of computer technology. So much so that it is at the expense of other truly fundamental and more profound educational areas as far as human spiritual and intelligential progress is concerned.
Despite information explosion and despite information overload, the fundamental problems to be solved, as far as humanity is concerned, are all still the same. That is to say, how to produce good men and women of adab, a happy family, and a just society against the likes of a criminal war, hunger and starvation, homelessness and mental illness.
To use the Qur’anic term, those matters relate to the ultimate things (Äkhirah) as far as the final reality of the life of this world and the ultimate reality of the Hereafter is concerned.
Meaning, that in the midst of present-day information overload, one truly needs schematic thinking. By schematic thinking, we are referring to that which is founded upon a knowledge-structure. It is exactly this epistemological framework which organizes and aligns informations and data in accordance with an ordered, comprehensible worldview or the vision of reality and truth.