We can recognize the feeling before we have a name for it. We open the news to understand a consequential event, then encounter a rush of alerts, clips, accusations, policy announcements, reactions, and breaking developments. By the time we close the app or browser, we’ve absorbed fragments from across the day without gaining a clear account of any one event.
That experience can produce a private sense of failure. We may conclude that we read too slowly, missed essential context, or lacked the discipline to keep up. The problem often lies elsewhere. Public information now arrives through systems that reward speed, repetition, emotional reaction, and constant return. When the volume exceeds the time available for verification and reflection, the difficulty is by design.
Information literacy begins there. It doesn’t ask us to consume every available piece of information out there, but gives us ways to assess origin, context, evidence, timing, and purpose. Those habits become especially valuable when a public event is surrounded by so much material that no single person can follow the whole field.
In early 2018, the writer Michael Lewis watched the State of the Union address with Steve Bannon, who had left the Trump White House the previous summer. Bannon described his approach to dealing with the media in an unusually direct phrase: “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” The phrase became shorthand for a familiar political and media tactic: saturating the public sphere with claims, controversies, provocations, and announcements so that sustained attention to any one damaging development becomes harder to maintain.
A flood of information doesn’t depend on every item being false. A fast stream can contain accurate reporting, misleading fragments, official statements, manufactured drama, and sincere public response. But the volume changes how all of them are received. Once we have more material than we can assess, the order of arrival begins to govern attention more than evidence does.
The language of flooding also explains why ordinary habits often fail during such periods. Opening one more tab doesn’t solve the problem, nor does saving every link we come across. And sharing the most alarming claim before its context is established can deepen the same conditions that made it hard to think clearly in the first place.
A practical response lies in preparation and boundaries. A flood doesn’t disappear simply because we understand that a flood is happening. We can, however, decide how much enters our day, when we examine claims, what we preserve, and which sources and institutions we trust to help watch the wider field. Those boundaries preserve our ability to follow public events without letting volume choose the order of our attention.
The phrase “flood the zone” comes from American football. One team tries to move the ball by throwing it to a teammate. Sometimes, it sends several teammates into the same small part of the field, each ready to receive the throw. The other team can’t watch everyone at once, so one teammate may have a clear chance to catch the ball.
Information flooding puts similar pressure on attention. Journalists and readers have limited time to investigate what they encounter. When many claims, controversies, announcements, and reactions arrive at once, they can’t give each one equal scrutiny. A consequential story may then be crowded out, while a less important or more provocative item captures attention. A stream of loosely related claims can also consume the hours that reporters and readers might otherwise spend examining a development with lasting consequences.
This tactic isn’t new. Governments and organizations have long been accused of releasing unfavorable news when public and press attention is already divided. Crowded news cycles can make sustained scrutiny harder to secure. Digital platforms intensify those pressures by distributing material continuously, while systems built to maximize engagement can give emotionally charged posts greater visibility. Fresh reactions can then seem more urgent than the evidence warrants.
The result can be disorientation. People may lose confidence in their ability to reconstruct what happened and decide which accounts deserve trust. By the time a correction arrives, attention may have shifted elsewhere. A well-reported investigation then competes with a fast-moving argument that generates repeated commentary and intense reaction.
The burden of verification also falls unevenly. Making or reposting a claim often takes less work than tracing the claim to its original source and examining the evidence in context. Comparing independently reported accounts only adds further effort. That difference gives a high-volume publisher an advantage over anyone trying to evaluate each item responsibly.
Generative AI has made one part of that imbalance more pronounced. It makes plausible-looking text, images, audio, and video easier to produce at scale. A coordinated campaign still needs to get material in front of people and make it seem worth trusting. But the supply of material is now easier to expand, and more of it can circulate through the same channels where reliable reporting competes for attention.
Ordinary acts of sharing can also move the flood forward. A screenshot can pass from one group chat to another after being separated from its original source. A video clip can circulate after its beginning or ending has been removed. With each act of sharing, another unexamined item can enter someone else’s field of attention before its meaning has been established.
A flooded zone rarely announces itself. Any one item may look ordinary on its own. The pattern becomes visible when we notice what the accumulation is doing to our attention: which subjects dominate and which questions go unanswered.
Several conditions often appear together:
One subject suddenly dominates alerts, feeds, conversations, and commentary across many platforms
New reports arrive faster than earlier ones can be checked or placed in context
A major story slips from view before its central questions have been answered.
Corrections may receive less attention than the claims that prompted them
A sudden controversy coincides with a consequential vote, ruling, executive action, corporate decision, or policy change
A fast-moving controversy may dominate coverage at the same time a government or organization announces a decision that changes public policy or institutional practice. And when that happens, we can examine whether the controversy displaced attention from the decision without assuming that the timing was coordinated.
Some developments provide advance warning. Periods of political consequence (especially elections and major policy developments) often produce concentrated waves of coverage. Keeping a calendar of such events can help us anticipate periods when public attention may face greater pressure. The calendar can also help us decide which sources or developments deserve closer attention beforehand.
A private record can deepen that awareness. We might note a major controversy, the date it appeared, and other public actions occurring around it. Returning later can reveal which event dominated attention and what subsequent reporting clarified. The record turns vague overwhelm into an account of how public attention moved.
Information literacy asks whether a claim is supported by evidence. In a flooded zone, we also examine how the claim reached public attention and which event lost visibility after it appeared. Placing the claim within that wider information environment shows how volume affected what the public had an opportunity to examine.
When water rises, sandbags are placed between the flood and a home. They redirect the current before it enters the house, leaving the source unchanged. An information flood calls for a similar response. Trying to absorb every claim and reaction allows the flood to occupy more of the day. But we can place boundaries between the surge and the attention we need for judgment and daily life.
I call those barriers sanity sandbags. These deliberate actions limit how much of a flooded information environment enters our daily lives. They create boundaries between the flood and the parts of our life that need protection (our capacity for judgment and our nervous system regulation chief among them). We can remain aware of what’s happening without giving a relentless stream of information authority over every available moment.
Sanity sandbags can be set before predictable periods of high volume or added after the flood has begun. Each one creates more room to assess what is happening. The added distance helps us decide how to respond without allowing urgency to decide on our behalf.
Create distance from the live feed.
We close the feed and step away until the next planned check-in. Channels carrying emergency instructions or information tied to an immediate responsibility remain open. Distance comes first here, because every later choice depends on having enough attention left to choose deliberately. Breaking news can feel hardest to leave because uncertainty creates pressure to keep checking. But during those periods, reporting is still being assembled. Early accounts may conflict before basic facts have been confirmed. Corrections may not reach the people who saw the first claim. When we return, the reporting may include evidence and context that were absent from the first accounts.
Stepping away during a public crisis can feel like neglecting a duty. Continued exposure can weaken the attention we need to evaluate later reporting. We step back so that we can return with enough attention to compare accounts and decide what deserves further examination.
Preserve what belongs to your own work.
A flood can make every passing item feel irreplaceable. Once we step away from the feed, another anxiety appears: what if the article or post disappears before we save it? That fear keeps us tied to the current. Each new item can seem to demand a private copy.
The concern reflects a documented problem. A Pew Research Center analysis found that one quarter of webpages available at some point between 2013 and 2023 could no longer be reached in October 2023. Link rot describes one form of digital loss, when a link no longer leads to the page it once did. Some pages disappear entirely. Others change through revision or become difficult to locate as newer material accumulates.
Saving material can keep this public record within reach. The difficulty begins when the urge extends to everything moving through the feed. A personal archive can grow faster than we can organize or revisit the collection. The work of saving begins to resemble the flood itself, with each new article creating another demand on our attention.
Preservation becomes manageable when the labor is divided. We keep the pages tied directly to our responsibilities. Sources supporting our writing belong in a personal archive, and records needed for an ongoing responsibility may also deserve a personal copy. Public pages, however, can sometimes move into institutional archives. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has collected copies of webpages since 1996. Its Save Page Now feature lets anyone request an archived copy of a public page. The End of Term Web Archive preserves federal websites during presidential transitions, when official information can change or disappear. So a page earns a place in our personal archive when losing it would interfere with work already in our care or remove evidence we need to retain. Material of wider public consequence can go to a shared archive, leaving our personal archive small enough to use rather than turning it into another place where the flood continues.
Choose when the news enters the day.
Once we’ve decided what belongs in our archive, we can decide when the news enters the day. We choose a fixed reading window and keep the feed closed in between. The boundary replaces ambient monitoring with a deliberate encounter that has a beginning and an endpoint.
A live feed presents events in the order they surge into view. A trusted human-edited roundup can place developments beside reporting that explains their context. Reading within a defined window places accounts beside one another, making comparison possible before a new alert redirects our attention.
A fixed reading window also limits repeated exposure. RAND’s review of psychological research notes that repetition can make a claim seem more credible. Encountering the same assertion fewer times leaves less room for familiarity to influence our judgment before we’ve examined the evidence.
Give the story time to become clear.
A breaking report can create pressure to decide immediately what happened and how we should interpret the event. But the pressure often arrives before reporting can answer either question. The conclusion we form under that pressure may rest on evidence that remains incomplete.
For developments that don’t demand immediate action, consider the first reporting as provisional. Avoid building a firm view around material created during the first rush of coverage. The first version of a story can contain a partial account without showing the sequence that gave an event its meaning. Later reporting can place that account within a fuller record, showing which conclusions the evidence supports and which questions remain open.
The pause protects memory as well as judgment. Psychologists use the term continued influence effect for the way misinformation can continue to affect reasoning after a correction. An early claim may influence how we understand an event after later reporting has shown the claim to be incomplete or false. The first account becomes a reference point for the information that follows. Waiting before we commit to an explanation gives more complete reporting a chance to arrive before that account settles into memory.
Some floods consist of accurate developments arriving too quickly for close attention. A series of executive orders or court decisions can overwhelm attention even when the reporting is sound. Waiting doesn’t mean ignoring events that affect our lives or delaying action when time matters. But the pause gives us room to decide which developments need a response now and which stories will become clearer as reporting develops.
Pause before passing a claim along.
During a surge, passing something along can feel like a public duty. We may want to warn someone about a claim, or ask for help making sense of what we’ve seen. Before sharing, though, we can ask whether the material has a source the recipient can inspect for themselves. We can also ask whether we have enough context to explain what the material shows and what remains unresolved. When either answer is uncertain, leaving the material unshared keeps an unverified claim from entering another person’s day through someone they trust.
Pausing preserves the difference between repetition and corroboration. A claim can appear to have support when several posts repeat the same account without adding independent evidence. Sending the original source allows the recipient to examine the evidence directly. Naming any unresolved questions keeps our message from sounding more conclusive than the reporting supports.
The pause also changes our own relationship to the flood. We spend less time attached to every fast-moving item. We also spend less time following the reactions that appear after we share a message. People close to us receive fewer questionable claims through our messages. Each decision not to forward closes one route through which the flood would otherwise expand.
Share the work of paying attention.
A flood becomes harder to manage when one person tries to watch every place where water may break through. When several areas need attention, people can divide the watch and alert one another when conditions change. Public information presents a similar problem. No one person can follow every court decision or international development with equal care. Dividing the watch lets each of us follow a smaller part of public life more closely.
We can divide that work among people whose judgment we trust. One friend may follow decisions from the courts. Another may understand events in a region through family ties or knowledge of the local language. Each person can share reporting that identifies where the information came from. They can also explain what the reporting has established and what remains uncertain.
A shared news watch can begin with one other person who follows a different area. Each person sends reporting when a development affects an issue the other has chosen to follow. A larger group can agree on a limited set of subjects and use one shared channel for reports. An incomplete watch can still extend what each member can follow. The arrangement gives us access to knowledge beyond our own attention without recreating the continuous feed inside the group.
Every instance of the flood assumes the same thing about us: information is something done to us, arriving at a pace someone else sets and in an order someone else arranges. The assumption runs so deep that people announce the strategy openly, the way Bannon did, without fear it will stop working once we know. The people who flood the zone are attacking our attention, and deciding for ourselves how we take in the news is how we refuse them. Each time the water rises, we choose whether to be the passive audience the entire strategy depends on. The zone will flood again, around the next election or the next manufactured uproar, but putting the sanity sandbags in place can begin as early as tonight.
Every flood is built on the same wager: that the people underneath it will stay scattered, exhausted, and alone. Meeting the next one on our own terms, at our own pace, in the company of people we trust, is how they lose that bet. The water will keep rising, but it no longer gets to decide how we move through it.
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You might also like:
A Field Guide to Information Overload: How to navigate an environment built to distract us.
The Unspoken Rules of Information Etiquette: Six practices for how to treat each other when we exchange information.
The information diet isn’t enough. What we need is an information village.: What changes when we go beyond optimizing our consumption and start building shared infrastructure.
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