Why is information expensive?

Everyone should subscribe to A Word A Day. For more info see http://wordsmith.org/awad/subscriber.html.

In addition to a new word every day, the service also provides a new "random" quotation every day. Here's the one from today:

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 sources that might consume it. -Herbert Alexander Simon, economist, Nobel laureate (1916-2001)

The idea that information "consumes" our attention (and even ourselves) us is interesting to me, and it is one of the primary reasons that we need to teach our students how to make good decisions about what to pay attention to, especially since our popular culture is infatuated with "information" that is of little educational value.