The Myth of Information Overload
Slate magazine recently published a great article about information overload.
It’s nice to see some news outlets are coming around to the idea information overload is part of life, and the human mind has always wrestled with filtering chaos into something manageable.
A jungle full of food and predators and allies and enemies is no less of a deluge of data than an Internet full of blogs and social networks and emails and Tweets.
Getting up in the morning and going through 200 emails while you browse Twitter and check the statuses of your Facebook friends before cleaning out your RSS reader is laborious – but so is waking up to feed the pigs, milk the cow, reap the wheat, dig the outhouse and make sure all the kids have breakfast.
The Slate article points out how soon after the invention of the printing press in the 1440s, intellectuals began to warn the public of the dangers of information overload.
The world at that time suddenly had more books in it than any one person could ever read.
But, our collective fear of new technology overloading our puny brains goes back further than that.
“Worries about information overload are as old as information itself, with each generation reimagining the dangerous impacts of technology on mind and brain. From a historical perspective, what strikes home is not the evolution of these social concerns, but their similarity from one century to the next, to the point where they arrive anew with little having changed except the label.
“These concerns stretch back to the birth of literacy itself. In parallel with modern concerns about children’s overuse of technology, Socrates famously warned against writing because it would “create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories.” He also advised that children can’t distinguish fantasy from reality, so parents should only allow them to hear wholesome allegories and not “improper” tales, lest their development go astray. The Socratic warning has been repeated many times since: The older generation warns against a new technology and bemoans that society is abandoning the “wholesome” media it grew up with, seemingly unaware that this same technology was considered to be harmful when first introduced.”
The article goes on to point out how just about every medium or technology was once criticized by intellectuals of the day as being the ruin of their time – newspapers, books, phonographs, telephones, telegraphs, radios, motion pictures, televisions, cable, cell phones and now, of course, the Internet.
All of these things were once warned against as overwhelming the senses, ruining the attention span, isolating the heart and dumbing down the children.
Today, modern critics warn us about social networks, Google, Twitter and video game with the same ominous predictions.
They are wrong.
Information overload simply doesn’t exist. We have been dealing with the overwhelming amount of information available to us from moment to moment since we first starting keeping up with allies and enemies, locations of food, agriculture and so on.
There has always been more to take in mentally than we could spend our time digesting.
Clay Shirky correctly identified the real problem in a recent talk – filter failure.
Each generation has to learn the same lesson – you can’t keep up with everything. You have to establish filters, and those filters will have to be updated often.
To sum up his ideas, every once in a while the rules of information production change. After mass production made it possible to mass produce books, we became accustomed to filtering at the source. The people who owned the presses chose what got published.
The same rules later applied to TV stations and newspapers, magazines and radio stations.
The person who stood to profit from the media they produced also stood to lose their ass, so they learned to filter what went out into the world. The rules of natural selection weeded out those who did it poorly.
With the Internet, the cost of producing content dropped to almost nothing. Now everyone can produce it, and the filters are no longer at the source. Everyone is a town crier, a journalist, a newspaper, a TV station. Content is pouring in from everywhere. The filters are now within each consumer.
It turns out, Timothy Leary was right when he said power to the people is now power to the pupil. Properly choosing to put in our heads is the new liberty.
David Weinberger said in his lecture “Knowledge at the End of the Information Age” that it was the physical limitations of the book which led to the parsing of data for the last few hundred years.
Books can’t be infinite. They have a beginning and an end. It makes more sense to have books be about specific subjects instead of a mishmash of rants about disparate ideas.
Books also must be republished in new editions to gain updates and go through a long process of creation before eventually reaching the public.
There are many limitations in using the book, but it was the best way to keep our knowledge for over 500 years.
Our systems of categorizing and organizing data naturally followed the patterns which come from aggregating books into collections. Universities followed libraries, and until the Internet changed everything, these patterns of knowledge transmission shaped the flow of information in our lives.
Now we are experiencing a change in how data gets distributed to us, and we have to adjust. The comfort afforded us by allowing filtering to occur at the source, and the manageability which came from static documents like books are both gone.
Even the nature of telegraphs, the mail system and telephones allowed for an easier way to filter incoming data. But with text messages, email and voice mail – the filtering is on our end.
With everyone producing content from every corner of the planet, we must learn how to filter well. Every minute, 22 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube. Right now, there is about 400 years worth of video already uploaded there.
With living documents like Wikipedia and blogs, and the ephemeral shape-shifting outlets like Twitter and Google Buzz – we must learn to be agile.
The thing is, even if we don’t, it doesn’t matter. In 500 years hence, people will have already adapted to current concerns in the way we have with old technology. Their concerns will be the same with whatever they must deal with.
Whenever an engineered system replaces an evolved one, we freak out, and rightly so. Oral history and storytelling evolved over time, books and scrolls swooped in and created an artificial organizational system – an engineered replacement for something we already had an intuitive understanding of.
In other words, some things are just in our blood. We come out of the womb with a brain ready to deal with a variety of information inputs. Systems which take advantage of those instincts work better and are more successful, but they don’t always get it right.
We will always have an intuitive connection to anything our ancestors experienced. Our genes hum in ecstasy when we hear a good story told well. We instantly connect and accept television shows and movies – but those formats have had time to evolve to match our instincts.
As Clay Shirky has pointed out, Facebook is another engineered system which has replaced the old way, for many, of spreading rumors, or inviting people to parties, or sharing intimate information about things like breakups or illness.
Right now, social media is hit and miss, but over time, it will evolve to match our gut expectations. When you use Twitter to tell the world about your job, an evolved system smashes into an engineered one – the results will be messy while we continue to figure out how this system best meshes with our culture.
So, expect chaos for a while, and once we get all this nailed down, expect more.
