Information Overload

Although I found the entire excerpt from The World is Flat 3.0 that was assigned this week quite interesting, one statement really spoke to me: 

“And so 24/7/365 we are all working. And all this has happened in the twinkling of an eye — the span of the last two or three years.”  

It hit my current feelings right on the head. In the last few years, the amount of information we are all expected to access and process has been increasing at dizzying rates.

Now that getting news is a cinch, we are all expected to be informed on everything there’s information on. And now that staying connected is simple, we are all expected to respond rapidly to messages sent to any of our multiple email, online community, or social networking accounts. (Here’s a YouTube clip on why we all need three email accounts!) And on top of that, because you can call someone up on your cell or Skype for a steal, we are still supposed continue communicating using our actual voice (my grandmother often emails, Skypes/or calls, and sends a hand-written thank you note when demonstration of appreciation is in order).  It is all too much. 

It seems that soon either some of these online activities will die because their novelty has worn off  and we don’t have time to do it all (my guess is the Facebook phenomena will be the first to fizzle) OR we will find a way of becoming more efficient at consuming the information.

Currently, things seem to be moving in the second direction. I just started a reader for all of the class blogs, Delicious accounts, etc. The experience made me feel both liberated and imprisoned. How great! I can read all of this in one place! was quickly followed by Great! I have all of this to read. It’s not that I’m not interested in the information, I am just not interested in clocking in anymore time in front of the computer.

Before moving here, I had an iPhone, which helped the chained-to-the-desk feeling you get from consuming all of your online information from a standard computer. It also made me feel like I never disconnected from the computer — not sure that’s a good thing.

Another way of streamlining information for the online consumer, one I hadn’t thought of before linking to a Xark post that Sarah marked on Delicious, is scoring systems. The whole piece was interesting, relevant, and easy to digest, but one chunk in particular connected to my current obsession with information overload. 

“Information scalability. The No. 1 issue in modern communication is the superhuman rate of expansion in global information production. Mainstream media in 2009 attempt to deal with this problem by artificially limiting the “meaningful” sources of information and then applying “news judgment” to that limited stream. The engineering trick for journalism will be to create systems that scale the true global flow of data to levels that can be used comfortably by humans. This will be accomplished through information architecture, informatics, artificial intelligence, exotic findability structures, taxonomy/folksonomy systems, smart archival and curation techniques, plus multiple reputational and credibility scoring systems.”

I, and many others, already use reputational and credibility scoring systems when shopping on eBay and selecting recipes off foodnetwork.com. It is logical to extend these type of scoring systems to all forms of online information, which would enable us all to only consume the “best” information. Maybe in the news world that would mean only the information produced by highly skilled and trained journalists and presented by the most trusted sources??? Intriguing.

Alright off to another website to read about why the world isn’t flat while pondering ways to work ratings and reviews into our website project …