The information economy is creating new jobs, new wealth, and a new outlook on the world. By and large, this is good.

It’s not an understatement to claim that the world is fundamentally different than it was even 50 years ago: anyone with a smartphone has direct access to the almost every bit of information ever created. We tend to blindly say this is positive, but is it really? We’re not just inventing technologies and building companies, we’re creating a new world. We should take some time to recognize some of the unintended consequences of doing so.

Until pretty recently it wasn’t really possible to know a lot of things: there just wasn’t much information available. Before reading, you couldn’t know much beyond what you saw or heard. Even after literacy spread, there weren’t too many books available, and knowledge wasn’t very well organized. The world got much bigger with the printing press, and bigger still with the addition of radio and TV. But print, radio, and TV shared one problem that made them worthwhile: they were expensive to produce.

Never before in history has the human brain had to cope with so much information. We simply don’t know how to do it.

This may sound counterintuitive, but if it’s 1950 and you’re publishing the New York Times or preparing Edward R Murrow’s news script for TV and radio, a tremendous amount of time, energy, and money has gone into getting your message out, so it had better be accurate. News organizations were intent on maintaining their reputation for legitimacy, and consumers of news could be reasonably certain that, if nothing else, the core facts of the story were accurate. Said another way, we trusted the channel. The same was true of books and journals. In order for information to make its way into your house, it had a stamp of legitimacy, and it was finite.

Times have changed.

The internet has made information incredibly cheap to produce and distribute. As with any good, when something is cheap and easy to produce, we get a lot of it—and sometimes too much. The problem is that not all information is created equal: some is expensive to produce, and some is not. In a world where CNN is competing with Lady Gaga for people’s attention on twitter, fact-checking can’t keep up with stream of consciousness opinion as they compete for pageviews. Across social media, news aggregators, and even legacy news sites, real journalism is being drowned out by noise masquerading as signal. 

Never before in history has the human brain had to cope with so much information. We simply don’t know how to do it. 

Since we can’t keep up and our attention is scarce, we focus on the familiar: what our friends are saying, opinions we agree with, and what celebrities are saying. Is there any reason to believe what Donald Trump says about anything other than real estate? No, but he’s far more familiar and entertaining than a peer-reviewed study on the economy, and so he commands our attention. Fame and trustworthiness are not synonyms.

On the internet, it’s possible for things to be even worse. At least when we all listened to the same broadcast we had the facts in common. Today it’s possible to have your own facts. How do we find common ground when we can’t agree on reality?

In a funny way, literacy is to blame: we learned to trust the written word, radio, and television, but then the world changed and that trust is now misplaced. We need a new form of literacy, one that moves beyond letting us consume information and instead lets us evaluate—and when we need to, disregard.

So what do we do? Obama’s online campaign manager, Clay Johnson, thinks we need to make active decisions about the information we consume. Dan Whaley, the inventor of online travel reservation, is looking to technology to help solve the problem. And Fox News thinks everything is fine.

No matter what solution wins out, we all need to approach all information with a healthy dose of skepticism. In the words of Benjamin Franklin: “Believe none of what we hear and only half of what we see.” That’s a good start