Received wisdom online says: it’s so obvious that we’re overwhelmed by information. There’s just too much of it and most of it is garbage, especially now that anyone can post her thoughts on the Internet. Fortunately, we have ways of telling what’s important and who’s an authority… like by looking at who has the most subscriber numbers.
But more fortunately, there’s an entirely different way of looking at this supposed problem of information overload. How about this: you’re not overloaded by information. There’s no need to find the right set of experts to follow or the signal in the noise of it all — in fact, there’s no such thing as a “right set of experts” and there’s no absolute way to distinguish signal from noise; it’s all signal, it’s all noise.
There are many paths you might take through the ocean of information, each of which promises connection and inspiration. You don’t know — can’t know — beforehand which will provide the optimal connection and inspiration and knowledge. So instead of deluding yourself into thinking you can find the right information to consume and then consume it all you can enjoy your serendipitous trips through information possibility.
Cory Doctorow thinks we need to get comfortable with acquiring information probabilistically:
There was a time when I could read the whole of Usenet — not just because I was a student looking for an excuse to avoid my assignments, but because Usenet was once tractable, readable by a single determined person. Today, I can’t even keep up with a single high-traffic message-board. I can’t read all my email. I can’t read every item posted to every site I like. I certainly can’t plough through the entire edit-history of every Wikipedia entry I read. I’ve come to grips with this — with acquiring information on a probabilistic basis, instead of the old, deterministic, cover-to-cover approach I learned in the offline world.
So is the answer better tools for finding the “right” stuff so we can ignore the wrong? One commenter on Cory’s post thinks so:
There is a *huge* opportunity in the software field for enabling source/authority, as well as data analysis on what should get our attention (and by extension, what should not)….
The current spate of RSS feed-reading tools is missing a major feature: None of them (Bloglines, Google Reader, NetNewsWire, etc.) provide help with answering the major focus problem, “Which feeds should I pay attention to?” They are great at collection and some simple organizing, but that’s just creating a bunch of haystacks. They still require us to laboriously look through each to find the needles (i.e., to assess value).
Yet this idea — that there is the stuff we should be paying attention to, there is some right stuff and some expert stuff and some stuff from authority — is what gives rise to the attention overload problem.
While there is more insightful stuff and less, more accurate stuff and some garbage too, there’s no particular set of information that’s the right information you should be reading.
The other side of probability is possibility, and there are many possible ways through your information consumption — so many possibilities that there couldn’t be one right way through it.
It’s time for some new metaphors for information consumption. Think of watching a river rush by. You don’t consume the whole river — you see whirlpools of water or glimmers of sunlight on it, maybe a school of fish beneath the surface. Think of surfing waves in the ocean. You don’t look for the very best wave or just the right waves. You surf the good ones that come to the place where you are.
Online information consumption is not “sipping from a firehose” because you don’t need to swallow it all. If you do try that, guess what? You’ll feel overloaded. It’s also not looking for a needle in a haystack. There are lots of needles and lots of hay and whether it’s needles or hay depends on where you came from and where you’re going and so many other little factors that make it impossible to know beforehand which it is.
Forget information overload. You’ll find inspiration, innovation, and connection in information possibility.
4 Comments
Occasionally, I feel like someone comes in and clicks on the light in my little “thought laboratory” and catches me working on an idea I haven’t blogged or podcasted about. This feels like one of those times.
When people ask me the interview question about a technology I want right now, I keep asking for something that can sniff through my data with more intelligence for me. I’m asking for a truly virtual assistant.
This thing I want will know that my boss emailed, but that the email is mostly fluff and that I don’t have to reply right away. The thing I want will know that my wife gave me a grocery list and will store it accordingly. The thing I want will know that the blogs aren’t really worth reading today for my SPECIFIC wants, or my “once in a blue moon” lists, and will qualify them for me to read in the order that I might find more value ( antlook.com is trying to do this right now).
And if the person interviewing me doesn’t like that answer, I tell them, “I want a pony.”
I like this concept better than the thought that we might filter based on somebody else’s idea of what is important (the “authority” model) - one of the benefits of the “river of news” is the serendipity involved, the information we didn’t know we were looking for until we found it, the insights that come to us almost accidentally because we don’t filter based on what was important to us yesterday.
In order to deal with the perception of overload then we need to start thinking that if we miss a reference in our river today, it will probably come past us again tomorrow. Will we miss some things completely? Yes - but there’s no guarantee that an “authority” would have presented them to us anyway … and there’s plenty of other good stuff to drink from - as you say, there’s no “right” and “wrong” here, only “different”.
Ouch! Guess I need to take out the garbage
Something I do is to start posts and then “save” them. Allows me to come back to my (potential) refuse and makes changes.
Also allows me to end up with half a dozen unfinished posts. Go figure. Thanks for the visit, Anne!
So, your posting washed up on the beach of my information river where I managed to catch it, read it and then — something I don’t often do — comment on it so that you know that I’ve read and appreciated what you had to say! I’ll throw it back into the river now and it’ll float on past me collecting point to someone else’s.
Forget the whimsy — the practical answer FOR ME is to group my chosen sources and then name the groups so that an alphabetical list provides the most “important” at the top. Starting at the top means that I do all the work-related reading (e.g. business news and press releases) whilst starting at the bottom gives me “zz interest reading” followed by “zz fun”.
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