Information Filtering
One of the most common frustrations expressed in the information age is that of information overload. As the anthropologist Marshall McLuhan put it, “One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There’s always more than you can cope with.” The problem, however, is not unique to the age of information technology. In fact, it dates all the way back to the information explosion in the middle of the 16th century. The Journal of the History of Ideas actually devoted an entire volume to what it called “Early Modern Information Overload” (See Journal of the History of Ideas 64.1 (2003)). One of the movements later developed to “cope” with the problem–though this is not the only impetus for this movement–is the encyclopedic tradition of the 18th century. The general sense of the issue at this time is expressed by the French philosopher and chief editor of the Encyclopédie (1755), Denis Diderot:
As long as the centuries continue to unfold, the number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed in nature as it will be to find it hidden away in an immense multitude of bound volumes.
From “bound volumes” to “digitized bits,” the problems presented by the amount of information in our own time may understandably be taken to be a bit more extreme. Yet one wonders whether it really needs to be. Sure, there may be over 24 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, but what percentage of that is really likely to be relevant to or good for you in the first place? In fact, what amount of all the information is likely to be truly beneficial for your own purposes?
We begin to see the real problem. Facing such a situation, it is much less important to ask “How do I find a way to consume all the information out there?” than it is to question, say, “How can I avoid more of the garbage so I can get as much of the good stuff as possible?” “Good stuff,” of course, includes a degree of relativity, but what this kind of question does is to shift the issue from the overwhelming problem of “There’s just too much information!” to the more constructive topic of “Where is all the information going, and how can I have some control over it?” Clay Shirky, a professor at NYU’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program, has provided the best name for this reconstruction of the issue: information filtering. In this talk from the 2008 web 2.0 expo, Shirky explains how this can be a more constructive way of conceptualizing the information in our midst.
We are to information overload what fishes are to water. It’s just what we swim in.
The larger problem, then, is not how to access and consume the information available, but rather how to filter the information in such a way as to push the most reliable and useful information to the surface. This is one of the primary challenges of our time, and it will be one of our areas of focus for Gnesio Tech, to highlight tools for organizing, accessing, and making use of high quality information, the kind of resources that help make the mental shift Shirky is talking about.
For the first of such features, see the article on Really Simple Syndication.
