I remember in high school talking about biology and as a test, you have to poke your arm with a small pin (lightly) and report when you can tell the difference between where it is and where your brain is telling you "Hey that's in a new place". The point was to demonstrate that our nerve endings are only so far apart and as a result only so capable of measuring change.

Has the same effect starting occurring to us all?

Have we lost the ability to detect the change in our history currently taking place. Is the saturation of information and data points due to 24/7 news, twitter's instantaneous results, devices on everywhere at all times, radio, billboards, blog posts and magazines. Have we come to a point where there is so much data we are simply filtering it all our, no longer having enough time to dig deep enough to evaluate the truthfulness of the statements?

When you have people lying to your face on TV and others refuting their claims, their recourse is often boiled down to "google ____ you'll see". Will you see? Will you take the time to verify claims or counter claims? Or do you do what too many do (myself included); look for the likes, hearts and retweets and use social validation as a sign of confirming correctness. Isn't that what all the others pushing that RT button did? Assume; assume with all the information they are getting bombarded with that their 20 seconds to read a tweet, process it, laugh and/or get angry and decide to RT... was this really enough to ingest, process, explore and assess?

Has technology eliminated our ability to do the hard work of looking.

It is not to blame the media, or blame the technology platforms; but it is to blame the self. Without self control, self moderation as to how much data we consume and expose ourselves to that we're losing what it is to be human. We're losing the desire to process, to go beyond simply reacting but to really, genuinely question, process, and respond (or even better, NOT respond).

Is there too much noise to really have things like facts matter? Are fact just what a large enough group of people say and feel? With access to so many so easily, it's easy to make the faulty assumption that quantity of agreement equates to quality of information.

We are a culture drunk on data, and as a result, we're not paying attention to what any of it means. Be careful who you aggregate.