An amusing quote on information overload

So wrote Herbert Simon (winner of Nobel prize in economics in 1978) in 1971: ... in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information resources that might consume it. I wonder if he was applying meta-humour, because he could've just said: information consumes attention.