The book "Algorithms to live by" by Brian Christian pointed out that as a society, we've switched in interpersonal communication from 'circuit switching' to 'packet switching'. I.e nowadays anyone can send anything, and it's the recipients responsibility to deal with all the messages coming in. Earlier, e.g. with phone, fax and paper mail, the communication bandwidth for incoming noise - err, I mean messages - was lower, and the individual did not need to deal with so much traffic.