Is there a thing like too much information?
I remember when I was in school and was told to do a project or an assignment I had to spend hours in the library and take down notes from relevant books. Even a simple thing like looking up the meaning of a word used to be a task, as one had to look it up in a dictionary. But by the end of it, what we achieved was information relevant only to the topics being researched.
These days kids are bombarded with a whole lot of information. With the advent of the internet and its easy availability, now the task has been reversed. Kids have to know what exactly they need or is relevant and ignore the rest. But this ‘ignore’ is hard to do for inherently inquisitive species like us.
There are a whole lot of more questions that arise due to this abundance of information. I am not saying questioning is bad but what about the relevance of the information for a particular age. I know that times keep changing but I still feel that there are some things that one should find out after achieving a certain amount of maturity. To give an example, just the other day one of my acquaintances was telling me that her 13-year-old daughter mentioned how two girls from their class came out of the closet. Even though it was a brave thing to do, but considering that these girls are in an all-girls school, they may or may not be in a position to take this decision. Also, one of her friends was considering suicide as that seems to be a way to make headlines like film stars. They did take her to the school counsellor immediately, but I was totally shaken with this.
There is so much happening everywhere that at a click of a button there is so much available that one may get confused. The balance needs to be maintained as to how much is too much. There’s a story that I always remember, a father and son went to the grocery store. They had 2 bags with them 1 heavy and 1 light. The son tried to go for the heavier bag as it was big and had appealing contents, but he couldn’t pick it up. The father said “ Son, as of now this small bag is all that you can take”. It’s the same with information, sometimes you cant carry the big bag.