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Intrinsic load is the natural load required to complete a task. It can be easy sometimes (driving from home to school) or heavy on others (being an air traffic controller), but we can be trained to cope with it. The Germane level of load is the optimum level we can cope with, where we maximise the load we are under. In lessons and projects we can feel that Germane load as 'flow', where everything's going in our favour, and then... Extraneous load comes along, where we all go wrong, especially when we are communicating information in, say, a presentation. It's when, mid flow, the grass starts getting cut outside. Or when someone has to leave a meeting early. Overload occurs here. The person who missed the earlier part of the meeting, or left early, or the sensation that someone is talking at you when you're in deep conversation with another person opposite, or the kid who doesn't understand where you're at, who isn't with you because they didn't understand the initial point of the project...

6. Allow feeds to overload. Just because you’re subscribed to an RSS feed doesn’t mean that you should be compelled to read it.

7. Set up a chat zone. I rarely if ever use IM or any other kind of chat, but for those of you who need to be connected at least some of the time, you should have a set period each day when you connect to IM.

13. Eliminate the news. Another huge source of information overload is news channels and sites.

Web 2.0 may look set to conquer the world, but it has yet to win over the 69 percent of Americans who failed to qualify as "elite tech users." That's the message from a Pew Internet & American Life report that came out today and provides a glimpse at how people in the US—not just techies—use and feel about the technology in their lives. The report, titled "A Typology of Information and Communication Technology Users" (PDF), breaks Americans into three general categories: elite tech users (31 percent of adults), middle-of-the-road tech users (20 percent of adults), and those with few tech assets (49 percent of adults). Pay particular attention to that last number; though technology marches on, half of all Americans use it only lightly or not at all. When the numbers are broken down further, a full 15 percent of all US adults have neither cell phones nor Internet connectivity.

Those with "few tech assets" make up 49 percent of the US adult population. Many of them have some form of access to the Internet, and most have cell phones, but technology "does not play a central role in their daily lives." Instead of being liberating, constant connectivity is "annoying," and many older users have trouble even navigating the Internet. The 15 percent of Americans who don't use cell phones or the Internet tend to be in their mid-60s with lower levels of income and education, according to the report.

How much of the information we process every day, and the communications we participate in (with varying degrees of engagement), actually provides us with useful (actionable) knowledge and useful capacities? Very little, I would argue. Just as most of our processed and 'fast' foods give us mostly empty calories and nothing of nutritional value (and lots that is toxic), so too, most of our information 'diet' is empty entertainment, designed to make us feel better without actually making us intellectually 'healthier' (and sometimes making us intellectually unhealthy).