Years ago, before social media, I did a presentation at an IABC conference that addressed information overload. The blogosphere didn’t exist, there were none of today’s social networks, no Twitter/Jaiku/Pownce, no media sharing sites, no social bookmarking or ranking sites. Yet email and the web alone seemed to be causing a panic. People overwhelmed by the volume of content lamented the good old days of the gatekeeper who pointed us to what was important. My friend Roger D’Aprix worried that the web turned everybody into a publisher, confronting people with billions of pages that could be read while it still takes as long to read a page of text (Roger said) as it did during the Reformation.

I opened my presentation with my personal definition of information overload:

If you don’t care about it, it’s crap to you, even though it might be gold to me. The point is this: There really is no such thing as information overload, as long as the information is content that is useful to you. We can’t get enough information about the stuff we care about. That’s why celebrity addicts gobble up every word about Paris Hilton, political zealots consume every source of political gossip, and sports fantatics devour every sports site and magazine and radio/TV sportstalk show.

Internally, I argued, the trick to managing overload was for the organization to deliberately manage the culture so each communication channel was used to its best advantage. Typically, IT departments rolled out new communication technologies using the “Godspeed” approach. (Remember when email was first introduced to your company? IT got the system up and running, installed an email on your client, and then vanished saying only, “Godspeed.” You were left to your own devices to figure out how to use it as a business tool.) I argued that companies needed a “Message Mission Control” function—funded and staffed—to weave best communication practices into the way things are done in the organization. I remain convinced that bad messaging habits represent a far greater threat to productivity that non-work-related online activities.

Now, social media is raising the same old fears. As Steve Rubel put it:

We are reaching a point where the number of inputs we have as individuals is beginning to exceed what we are capable as humans of managing. The demands for our attention are becoming so great, and the problem so widespread, that it will cause people to crash and curtail these drains. Human attention does not obey Moore’s Law.

It seems that everything that goes around comes around—this is almost word-for-word the same fear expressed a decade ago. And I still don’t buy. I still believe that we can’t get enough information about the stuff we care about. As I noted earlier, we’ll simply get used to it, make necessary adjustments, apply new tools to help us filter the stuff we care about from everything else and everything will be just fine. (Those of you with teenagers know that they don’t fear an attention crash; my 18-year-old daughter has integrated it quite nicely into her very active life, thank you very much. This is a worry held only by those of us who are technology immigrants.)

Internally, such adjustments can be managed by organizations that have the will to address the situation. For society at large, it’s simply a matter of incremental adjustment. If you don’t believe me, look at how the younger generation have all but abandoned email, one of the great early online sources of overload. That’s evolution, and it’s happening before our very eyes if we only stop to notice it. The same incremental adjustments are inevitable in the world of social media.