ABSTRACT
Boredom has been widely acknowledged as both a symptom and cause of spiritual and social alienation in modern life.1 As early as the 1980s, it has been linked in particular with information overload. In 1986, four years before the World Wide Web became publicly available, the sociologist Orrin Klapp wrote this thought on the connection between them:
Meaning and interest are found mostly in the mid-range between extremes of redundancy and variety – these extremes being called, respectively, banality and noise. Any gain in banality or noise, and consequent meaning loss and boredom, we view as a loss of potential . . . for a certain line of action at least; and loss of potential is one definition of entropy.
