Cory Doctorow has a column in internet evolution with the above title. He writes with his usual insight about the need we all have for help in dealing with the overwhelming incoming digital flood we cope with every day. He offers suggestions and hope for technologies empowering ignoring, and concludes:

Today, I can’t even keep up with a single high-traffic message-board. I can’t read all my email. I can’t read every item posted to every site I like. I certainly can’t plough through the entire edit-history of every Wikipedia entry I read. I’ve come to grips with this — with acquiring information on a probabilistic basis, instead of the old, deterministic, cover-to-cover approach I learned in the offline world.

It’s as though there’s a cognitive style built into TCP/IP. Just as the network only does best-effort delivery of packets, not worrying so much about the bits that fall on the floor, TCP/IP users also do best-effort sweeps of the Internet, focusing on learning from the good stuff they find, rather than lamenting the stuff they don’t have time to see.

The network won’t ever become more tractable. There will never be fewer things vying for our online attention. The only answer is better ways and new technology to ignore stuff — a field that’s just being born, with plenty of room to grow.