Slashdot Mirror
Knowledge Overload or Internet Lazy?
Dareth writes "Are we being overloaded by knowledge? Is the number of sources growing faster than we can keep up with them? These questions are posed by this article in USA Todays's tech section The article seems to suggest we need 'better technology to cope with the problems better technology creates.'" From the article: "With a generation growing up expecting everything on the Internet, libraries, non-profit organizations and leading search companies like Yahoo and Microsoft are committing hundreds of millions of dollars collectively to scan books and other printed materials so they can be indexed and retrieved online. HarperCollins Publishers even announced plans in mid-December to digitize its vast catalog."
I think having all this information at our finger tips can be a boon -- giving us more time to focus on discovery and research and development. I'm always amazed and what information bubbles to the top of Google searches (other than the obvious SEO attempts).
I was blessed with a terribly short memory from a very young age, but along with it came the ability to assimilate and aggregate seemingly different items together, and do so quickly. My bad memory led to VERY low grades but very high aptitude testing -- quite a conundrum. I took to BBSes and other forms of "instant variable information" quickly at a very young age, and when the Internet hit (mostly gopher at that time, from what I recall), I absorbed it immediately.
I don't think knowledge overload is necessarily a bad thing -- it is how you use the knowledge that allows us to make the "morality" consideration. It is the old "did the gun or the shooter kill?" debate, and one that I think may be one-sided when it comes to slashdot: many of us make our livings either by manipulating information for others, or by helping others get to that information.
I can think of many reasons why this information overload is positive, but I can also see how it can become a crutch for some. I have Google everywhere I go (WAP, SMS, HTML) and it is definitely a huge help in so many ways, but it also allows my already bad short term memory to not get the exercise it needs. While I feel I am much smarter at what I was always good at, I have probably become way dumber in what I wasn't strong in. Even the wife acknowledges my memory is worse now than it was 10 years ago (short term that is, my long term memory is very solid).
Some days I wonder if my memory problems might have been FROM an early introduction to the PC. When I was 4 I touched my first keyboard and quickly adjusted to using a keyboard over using a pencil (around 6 years). This is about 25 years ago. Is what I have more like the ADD that today's youths seems to all have, and do they have ADD because of the early introduction to knowledge overload? Do short attention spans possibly come from our 60-75hz gods?
It will be interesting to see who from the next generation holds true to the old information forms: pencil, paper, book, memory lessons.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You could say the heck with it all, join the Amish community and say the electron doesn't exist.
"It may take better technology to cope with the problems better technology creates."
Nah, that logic is all screwed up. We obviously need to engineer and release silicon eating rats to control the ever dispersing technology, and rat eating cats, then cat eating dogs, and finally, open a lot of vietnamese restraunts everywhere technology was over-taking everyday human existance.
** "It's not my job to stand between the people talking to me, and the ones listening to me." -- Pego the Jerk
Main problem is imho people's tendency to use data storage models that belong in the 1970s.
Imagine everything was in an OLAP Cube. THAT would rock.
Information mutates or spreads like virus. Somehow all these newspapers should be punished who print the same story with only slight changes. When will we see something like F-secure for the news?
A good quote from TFA : "The library is daunting because I have to go there and everything is organized by academic area," Quaranta said. "I don't even know where to begin."
By this point, I think availability is growing faster than the body of useful knowledge. Even if the total amount of available information has doubled in the last 20 years, new search technologies make it 1000 times faster to find what you want (approximately, of course). While TFA talks about emerging technologies like del.ico.us and personalized search, I think the real boom is still to come, in the form of real AI.
When computers are fast enough and new algorithms are developed to really harness this power (I give it 10 years, give or take, for this to begin), computers will finally be able to at least have the semblance of understanding the body of knowledge rather than just syntactically sifting through it. This will give us another order of magnitude change comparable to the introduction of search technologies in the first place. Imagine being able to ask google "in one paragraph, summarize the most influential inventions of 2015". Not the most interesting or illuminating example, but you get the idea.
...it might as well not exist.
Like it or not, that statement is fast becoming reality. Adapt or die.
There has always been more information than one human can ever access, I think it is great that technology has given us search engines to allows us to find what we want nearly instantly, and not have to spend our whole lives reading vast librarys of books and never find what we were looking for.
In Soviet Russia, you overload information...
There has been more information known to humans collectively than a single human can grok for literally thousands of years. The web hasn't changed that in any significant way, except to make things easier since you can find the knowledge you want much easier now than before search engines and web ubiquity.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I gotta believe that it takes very little information to overload the average reader of USA Today.
.nosig
It's a feature, not a bug. HarperCollins should change their name to HyperCollins, and include a free sachet of insant coffee or methamphetamine with each book.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Yeah I'm pretty sure Google's one of the biggest if not the biggest operation of book-scanning.
Sounds like a call for AI if I've ever heard one...
I, for one, have long coveted my own personal librarian.
All rites reversed 2010
And then there are other more complex/obscure fields of knowledge: medicine, physics, engineering, the occult, computers, magnets, plastics, metals, law, government, the list goes on. Overload or Lazy?
The vast number of factors necessary to fathomable answers to the questions..."Are we being overloaded by knowledge? Is the number of sources growing faster than we can keep up with them?", are such that they point out the flaws inherent in the questions asked.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
A9, powered by Google.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
I just started theorizing a short while back on the idea that American social/political conflicts stem partially from too much information being available; there are so many differing opinions available, and so little available criticism of each, that we find it difficult to analyze it properly. When you compound this with the inherit laziness of Americans in certain populaces (backwater hick towns, for example), a huge problem begins to rear it's head, and begets conflict.
It is great to have it so readily available to us, and that we are free to share our own, but breaking down the information in order to determine it's validity becomes an incredible chore due to the sheer amount of conflicting opinions.
"Better to be vulgar than non-existent" -Bev Henson
I believe knowledge or information overload is a very real phenomenon. Basically it's just sensory overload of a different kind, right?
I live in Tokyo these days, and one of the more striking differences between the cityscape here and the one in my home city in Australia is the sheer number of advertising signs, shills, lights, boards, posters, flags and projections. Oh, and ten times as many are illuminated as I'm used to.
Now while the point of all this advertising is supposed to be that it catches your eye, in this case it's having the opposite effect -- I just tune out. Not just the advertising either -- I mean literally what's going on around me.
When I first arrived in Tokyo I played well the part of the wide-eyed tourist. Little escaped my attention. But these days I'm more likely to just pop in the headphones of my MD player and scuttle along to work while trying hard to see as little as possible.
I'm not the only one. One of my co-workers, a lady from the U.S., and I were discussing this recently. She mentioned that these days, she notices much less of what she used to. "I stopped on the footpath yesterday and just looked around, and was surpised to see all this stuff that I've just been walking past everyday!"
Same thing applies to information on the internet or wherever it's located. Eventually you have to start filtering out the chaff. Problem is that often a lot of wheat goes with it.
Look at the mainstream press and the mainstream commercial "news outlets" and compare them with all the varied sources of information on the net. You will find that most the big news media corporations (and there is, in reality, only a handful of them today even though all of them have a bundle of "different" media) and you will find that all of them are like clones who all parrot the party line and give little or no diversity. There may be too much varied information on the net, but the "voting system" where those sites linked the most get a higher ranking automatically sorts that problem out regardless of how many billion web pages there are.
The real issue is those using the Internet vs. those living in couch potato land who are passive receivers of information. The Internet allows you to actively research the news, get diverse opinions and so forth, and that ability is extremely important in order to get a real view of the reality behind the mainstream corporate media propaganda. There will never be too much information on the Internet, only too little brain-activity in the heads of those consuming news - Those those who choose to think for themselves, question all content and actually research news stories will always win over the dead-head mindless consumers - regardless of "how much information" there is on the Internet.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
There is no such thing as information overload. All you have to do is narrow your search, or re-evaluate what you thought you were looking for. Because the tools are more powerful, they require more thought to use effectively. Not an astounding surprise there.
This affected concern over "information overload" is ridiculous. Accessibility is a good thing. Being able to sit in your home late at night, hours from a decent library, and search Jstor or similar online resources is an amazing advance over where we were 20 years ago. True, we didn't know there was so much information out there, and we have to learn to use more specific search terms. Big flipping deal. This is like saying electric lights have created new problems because now people are staying up later. I'm usually ambivalent about just about everything, but information accessibility is like Schindler's list - it's an absolute good.
Now, if you want to discuss government and business collecting/abusing personal information, then we can talk. I'm referring to literature, financial data, legislation, etc, not forbidden political views.
Though the term "information overload" was coined, I believe, by Jan Noyes in her book, User Centred Design, this problem has been recognised for many years, most relevantly by Vannevar Bush in his essay 'As We May Think'.
A couple of posters have already mentioned that they use the Internet as an aid to long term memory (btw - short term memory is different to what many people think - it only last a few seconds. Problems recalling information (or not remembering something you dealt with in great detail a while ago is a problem of long term memory [decoding error]). This does result in problems: people (myself included) often try to solve the same thing twice before realising that they've already done it; and other relevant documents may be couched in unfamiliar terms but are not retrieved from search engines because the wrong phrases are used (the problem of 'synonymy' seen in search engines).
What people tend to do instead of committing facts to memory for rapid recall is that people use computers and information sources as artifacts to help them find things at a later date. The cognitive strategies used by people differ and do change when the information environment is more amenable. There's stuff about information foraging by Pirolli and Card at Xerox Parc for those who are interested.
bang goes my karma... again...
Hard work often pays off after time but laziness aways pays off now...
leading search companies like "those we have partnerships with, mutual investments with or who have a high percentage of our shares" --same old story..
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
Now, I cannot tell the reason why this has score zero, but on the face of it is an interesting story.
;-)
Maybe the shops could sue for loss of customers because the billboards overload the people passing by so that they don't see the shops
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Maybe they meant search companies who get permission to scan the books FIRST?
Look at the number of chain letter emails in your spam folder that are filled with misinformation easily checked at Snopes. Otherwise intelligent people pass on this crap without realizing they're polluting the information stream with fiction passed off as facts.
In the United States we need an education system that is actually oriented around giving children the ability to analyze information and make rational decisions. If you know how to swim, an ocean of information isn't very scary.
I find it very disturbing that people far younger than I, who have grown up in the Internet Age, often have no idea that the information they are absorbing is not all equally reliable. One of the first things I learned in school was that you can't believe everything you read. Perhaps we've forgotten how to teach that lesson, even though it is more important now than ever before.
The push is on to privatize schools and abandon the government's role in education. Market forces being what they are, I wouldn't be surprised if education conglomerates began to take over K-12 education. While privatization of education might not be a bad thing in other respects, something tells me large for-profit entities wouldn't be interested in pushing a curriculum that fosters healthy scepticism of marketing, mainstream media, and corporations.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
You speak too clearly, you will be vaporized.
That is all.
I clicked this post thinking there would be something about guns ... but much to my disappointment there were none. Thanks for ruining my New Years Eve!
google is in the article, if your read it. and so is amazon.
I'm not even going to dignify this article by reading it. From the blurb, I can't imagine it being anything other than a tech writer pulling something out of his arse to meet a deadline. 'Better technology to cope with the problems better technology creates'? I've written vague informationless things like that in high school english essays for which I hadn't read the related text.
So, we have the internet, and now there's a lot of information that's instantly accessible. Everyone knows this. There's no need to put some half-arsed cautionary spin on it.
*cough* Holding on to Reality *cough*
Nobody in the information age should go without reading Borgmann's book. I found it very influencial back in college and still defines my understanding of information theory.
Actually, I think technology is keeping up. I used to spend hours a day reading news sites, blogs, and whatever else. A lot of that time was spent simply checking for new stories. With RSS feeds I'm now alerted when there's something new that I haven't seen. Instead of wasting countless hours looking for information that I might find useful I now have it hand delivered to me in a nice little package and I find that when I'm bored I usually look to things other than the Internet to fill that time.
Maybe the article writer just needs to catch up to technology and get himself a good RSS reader.
I was cracking open the collected works of Charles Darwin over the holidays, and it struck me - boy they sure don't write 'em like this any more.
It occurred to me that my reading patterns have changed drastically in the last few years. I used to be a chain book reader. As soon as I was done with one, another would be on my night stand. Lately, I have been just reading magazines as I head for the pillow. I wondered why, and I realized that the way that I access information and put together knowledge has changed. While I still enjoy a good long book when I can find the time, a lot of what makes up my worldview is now assembled piecemeal, by patching together snippets of knowledge gleaned via message boards, articles, search engines, what have you - online. It may sound flaky, but I do believe that this method of learning does have some merit. Previously, I was entirely dependent on authors to guide my learning and point of view unchallenged through the form of the book. Now, when I am researching something - say, evolution - I can read in-depth articles in one tab of my browser, while in another, I keep an alternate point of view ready, and in a third, I keep search results for words that I need to look up.
It is a great boon to me to be so in charge of my education. However, the drawback is that I sometimes miss out on deep understanding that can only come from the long process of an extended narrative.
Back to good ol' Chuck!
From recent personal experience, there are two major ways we absorb data - intellectual and intuitive.
The intellectual approach allows you to carefully weigh the data on relevance, sources, and cross-references, allowing you to absorb information, and improve your knowledge. It's the approach everyone claims to aspire to, as you might then be able to put it into practice, and gain wisdom. But it's time-consuming, and without discipline can lead to a never-ending pyramid of learning (oh, the shame).
The intuitive approach allows you to quickly scan a wide range of data, and take a hunch on what it means. It relies on short facts from trusted sources. It's the approach increasingly encouraged in our short-attention-span society, as you can drop the topic as soon as you get your first answer. Sources are often trusted on a hunch, and so the whole process of learning pivots on an initial lucky guess. Since we're only ever looking for a quick answer, we usually focus on the information which supports our own position. The Internet only encourages this.
As with any human experience, there are levels of grey between the two extremes which are where we're likely to have the best success - learning real information without spending too much time about it.
How this pans out in your GP vs hypochondriac scenario, is that the doctor approaches it as learning, while the hypochondriac is only seeking confirmation of her original beliefs.
In my case, I have found the simple process of pregnancy (over 6 billion successes and going strong) has such breadth of conflicting information (and fear) available that you either approach it intellectually (check sources and cross-reference), or just ignore the whole thing and trust in biology.
With each breath in, a flower somewhere opens; with each breath out, a flower withers away. In between lies beauty.
"Even if the total amount of available information has doubled in the last 20 years, new search technologies make it 1000 times faster to find what you want (approximately, of course)."
Finding information faster isn't the same as finding better information faster.
"I think the real boom is still to come, in the form of real AI."
That will help, but AI will not help the questioner ask better questions.
The GIGO principle still applies, even in AI...or people.
Within the past few years, I've really come to believe that the old adage "ignorance is bliss," is completely true. Day after day of being bombarded with news of terrorist warnings, new diseases, new laws, scandals, etc. I am just tired of hearing all of it. I rarely hear a piece of single genuinely good news on the Internet or TV - yes, I still do watch TV news often. It's depressing. The worst part of all of this, is that I feel there is nothing that I can do as a single person with any of these pieces of information. Can I personally impeach a president? Can I personally launch an investigation of some corrupt corporation? It all makes you feel very helpless as an individual in our modern society, and that's not a good feeling.
I suppose my attitude is a huge part of it. I could be more positive about the information that I'm seeing on a regular basis, but since so little of it is positive news, it sure is tough to keep that attitude up.
hello dear sirs my name is jamesh i are india (bihar) can u guide me install red had linux 9?
Geeze, come on. We have advancements in technology that allows much faster access to many more subjects than in the past and people question whether or not it's a good thing?? The same analogy can be applied to modern farming and the supermarket. Are we having an overload of food or are we just too lazy to farm? We are not too lazy to farm. Instead, we have mastered agriculture which has allowed us to pursue other interests in science, business, the arts, etc. As with everything else, the truly lazy will abuse it - i.e. stuff their faces or never read a book - but that should not raise doubt as we progress onwards.
Who's more likely to take out an ad in the USA Today: Microsoft or Amazon/A9?
Or a different twist... "scientific" information about a disease from a ("research hospital") doctor and a ("revolutionary new drug") drug company are trusted equally poorly. There is a ton of information out there of questionable value in everything from the impossible politics to what ought to be pretty solid science. No one has time to go to the primary sources to get the information, even assuming primary sources are out there with proper references in a language that is accessible to anyone outside of the field.
I don't know what the hell is going on in Iraq, but I know I can't trust pretty much anyone to tell me. Similarly I'm not sure what kind of diet is ACTUALLY optimal for me personally. There's no shortage of information, some of it good, some bad, most of it has grains of truth with a lot of hyperbole or just misinterpretation of a subtle point. The only things I can believe unequivocally are the things I'e witnessed first hand (even if they are statistical anomalies, such as all the old smokers I know having died or are dying of cancer). Unfortunately that kind of logic isn't.
Having a lot of bulk information is less than useless, it's harmful. We need fewer, but more accurate sources.
There is no such thing as information overload. All you have to do is narrow your search, or re-evaluate what you thought you were looking for. Because the tools are more powerful, they require more thought to use effectively. Not an astounding surprise there.
Suppose you're not looking for something narrow, but instead what a summary of the state of a debate on an issue, at a particular level of detail. The problem is that the strong points of each side of a debate are either (1), diffusely spread (over for example many Slashdot comments and many Slashdot stories), or (2), are presented as a summary that cannot simultaneously be both comprehensive and easy to digest (for those wanting a quick or simple introduction to the debate) and which does not provide an clear and easy way for opposite sides of the debate to have a point by point engagement (Wikipedia for example).
Features like comment moderation help, but information overload means that moderation only properly works for comments posted in the first few hours of a debate. Good points are often buried in noise.
What is needed is an online forum which provides both a permanent memory of the state of various debates, which is able to present the debate at multiple levels of detail, and which forces the various perspectives on the issue under debate to face off point by point so that weak and irrelevent points are exposed and forced out.
My attempt at this is makethecase.net. The main page needs some major prettification, but here is the "About" page, and here is my essay explaining why I think something like this is needed.
Some people are visual learners, some people need extra one-on-one assistance, but the idea that each head full of mush acquires knowledge the same way is foolish. "What about their self esteem?" What about their ability to learn, instead of gym classes and overloads of memorization?
It's a known fact that private / religious schools cost less per student per year, but the national teacher's unions won't allow their field to be shaken up.
On another note, does anyone else surmise that TV's constant commericals, even on kids' shows, is fostering ADD/ADHD?
The poster got it in one. Information overload contrary to some posters isn't an inability to use the tools around you. People are quite capable of filtering their environment (sometimes too well). The problem is as said in the last paragraph. Some of the good is being lost in the process of filtering the irrelevent (keeping in mind the ever shifting "good" and "irrelevent" tied to circumstances). Adding evermore information simply aggrevates the situation. That's why the story suggests technological aids (I recommend training as well). Between man and machine, the feeling of control (as opposed to out of control) will be more at hand. The amount of information will still be beyound our lifetimes to fully thrash through, and understand, but we will be at peace with what we have.
Really, what is information overload? Do you get so much information you start forgetting the stuff you just got? Is your brain getting hotter or does it shut down? I don't think so. Information overload is what you make yourself for it. I read different newssites (slashdot and other) every day multiple times a day, follow up on forums etc. I don't think I get too much information because I don't want the extra information and I filter it out. Maybe some people have problems with filtering the stuff they don't want to read/see/hear but that's their problem and you can get that online, at school or anywhere else. Information overload is according to me just another buzzword to keep scholars and professors who don't have anything else to do busy and off course they make money out of it etc. etc.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
The Amish are typically looked down upon as ludites or anti-intellectuals, especially with regards to technology.
The reality is more complicated. Basically, that they simply have different values than most urban Americans.
They refuse to allow technology to intrude into the parts of their life which they value the most: Eg: personal relationships.
Many Amish sects actually allow the use of telephones, but not in the home. Several homes will sometimes share a telephone housed outside in a small kiosk the same way that several houses may have a common location for their mail boxes.
The tendency, when faced with new technologies, is for the Amish to wait a good long time to see the effects of the technology on the larger society, and then make a decision as to whether to allow it into their towns.
That may be viewed as being very conservative, but its certainly not crazy or stupid.
Thinking about the amount of knowledge that has been available in the past, and what it meant to acquire knowledge, there is far more knowledge than ever before in history. There is enough information on the Internet to acquire the sum total of knowledge gained from any given 4-year degree (just without the paper to show for it) but that doesn't mean that people (in general) are using it or doing anything useful with it. Computers are getting more powerful and software more sophisticated, but I'm not even going to bother spellchecking these few sentences. Most people don't bother with such helpful tools unless there is no other way to do things, in fact many use telephone keyboard shortcuts for everything anyway. Technology and information will not change the face or facts of the human race as long as the human race continues to be what it is and has been. There will always be those that take advantage of it, but the vast majority will not. I know degreed engineers that don't bother to have a computer at home... it doesn't interest them. There are many people that just aren't interested enough to take advantage of knowledge that you have to work for.
Real AI will not tell you what you are supposed to do or learn, it will simply make it easier to do so, so AI is not able to help you anymore than your friends are or your teachers. Information overload is not the problem, the public library has always been a source of more information than ordinary folk could absorb on their own. AI won't even act like a brain enhancement as we humans are constrained by the wetware we are born with. You cannot take someone with an IQ of 'well-below-average' and expect them to become more intelligent or smart simply because they have access to the Internet.
Information is not the source of the overload, it is the restrictions of our brains that is the source of overload feeling. The advertisement of an article is trying to sell something but I am not reading it...
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
With a generation growing up expecting everything on the Internet
The Internet has ruined the world. Sure, it has the potential to bring GREAT things, and some great things have arisen from the use of the Internet (Google, Slashdot, cheap phone calls, rapid sharing of files and other information,etc).
The problem is that everyone has come to expect that it is some fundamental human right and requirement to be connected to the Internet. This means every man and his dog is out there putting their views on webpages, spouting off their views in forums (hey, i'm guilty of it... I'm here), giving incorrect advice on message boards, etc.
This information never goes away. It's not like a phone conversation or a book, where it will likely be destroyed. Search engines archive it, the wayback machine archives it, people archive it. There is not too much information, there is too much hot air on the Internet. It's getting hard to find things through all the advertising, the porn, the wank from people without a clue and the general junk.
I've been with the Interdoodle since the early 90s. That was really a good time. The Spam problem wasn't so much an issue - it was really just winding up. Search engines rapidly found what you wanted (as long as the search couldn't remotely be linked to porn) and there were generally less idiots on there because the Internet was mostly only available to university staff and large companies back then. The idea of personal Internet was still largely unheard of.
Now, with the widespread adoption of the Internet in schools, coffee shops, shopping malls, universities, businesses, etc, people are accustomed to always being connected. This means they can always "google it". I find that a lot of the problem is that kids are learning the search engine in school, and not the library. They are learning the word processor instead of the pen. They are learning the instant messenger instead of the postal service. They have come to expect to be able to find it online and they have come to trust any page that says what they want it to say without any verification at all.
This really is a case of Internet laziness rather than good old-fashioned people getting smarter. The Internet is probably stifling productivity and innovation becase people are spending too long looking to it for answers to even simple questions.
The solution lies in taking the Internet out of schools and encouraging students to go to the library and use resources like... $DIETY help us... books, teachers, peers, used car salesmen, etc. There are a lot of places people could look instead of the Internet.
I drink to make other people interesting!
I have a ruthless drive to find knowledge about China, warfare, history, cultures, technology and as of yet the internet is woefully skimpy on details and is often wrong in general. If they can archive enough online information in html format (pdf's suck) I'd pay to access it, up to $10 CND a month (hobbies have monetary limits). If it's free all the better. Unfortunately I'm a minority in this world, and most people would want it for free and most people just want to know what Bennifer II had for breakfast and how many anti-matter relays a constallation class starship has.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Having a lot of bulk information is less than useless, it's harmful. We need fewer, but more accurate sources.
Exactly right. Too much information makes it difficult to find meaning.
...to this problem is to just not read TFA. In fact, I barely read the /. blurb. To be completely honest, I didn't even bother to proofread this post in fear of overloading my knowledge circuits. It's not that this post contains so much interesting information, which I don't think it does, but because I barely have space enough in my brain for another 1.45 sitcom series plots. (For those of you who aren't familiar with the Hollywoodian system of metrics, this works out to about 2.7 of these posts or 4.3 Dvorakian rants.)
On that note, I would apologize in advance if I've ripped off anyones ideas here, but as you might have gathered by now, I can't read any of the posts in fear of blowing a brain fuse.
I'd also like to take this time to apologize to the readers of this post; if I wasn't too lazy to edit it for content, it might have been excellent. Please just picture a really funny and insightful post, and you have roughly what I intended.
Thank you, I'll be here all year.
The view was horrible and the smell was even worse; Julie severely regretted becoming a proctologist.
...information...can't...handle...must...fight...
**EXPLODES**
As long as there are decent indexes, there's no such thing as information overload.
A good index allows one to narrow down one's search while also allowing serendipity. It allows one to state the same thing in multiple ways, while also informing the user of proper taxonomy. It is up to date and complete.
The only people who think there's too much information are the people who can't figure out how to access it efficiently, and get overwhelmed - people who fret over new tools, rather than embrace them.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
The amount of available information resources is growing faster than we can handle. However, considering how reduntant, rediculous, or useless most of them are, the amount of GOOD information available is growing at a dismal rate. On top of that, the perceived ratio of good to bad appears to be getting much worse. Case in point, /. used to be THE place for up-to-date news and good debate, but now, while the news is still pretty good, the debates almost always devolve to emotional name calling and/or religious/political debate that has little or nothing to do with the news at hand.
s/knowledge/facts/
Knowledge is earned.
One must draw a distinction between knowledge and information (knowledge is useful, information is just information). I think some Neil Postman would be of use here.
"A good compromise leaves everyone mad." -Calvin
This takeoff on the title of Alvin Toffler's book from decades ago, combined with Sturgen's Law that 90 percent of everything is crap, inspires the tagline "too much crap in too little time."
Tag lost or not installed.
No, the only major difference today is that card catalogs are becoming obsolete, because library catalogs are now online. Despite what the techie fanboys would have you believe, the best source of information is still in paper form, not on the internet, and despite what Google would like you to believe, the vast majority of that information is not going to be freely available online any time soon; the commercial interest just isn't there.
There is really no substitute for going to the stacks in a good library, going to a shelf where books and journals for the topic of interest are, and just skimming over them one by one, taking notes about what they say, and most importantly, about which other works they cite. People who acquire the habit of doing this are the true scholars.
Or, in other words, there's this whole dimension to your "learning to learn" things that you've seemingly not learned.
I think the whole "information overload" thing boils down to a lot of people who didn't learn "how to learn". If you learned how to discover new information in the most general sense, and on your own, the internet is not a source of frustration or overload -- it's a repository of all those things it doesn't make sense to store in your head.
No, the internet is a computer network. It delivers bytes from one host to another, and it doesn't care whether those bytes are valuable information, misinformation, or whether there is any host on the network that has the information you need. There are plenty of topics for which it doesn't.
No amount of Googling will be of any help if the information you're want is only available in paper form in Portugal, in archives of documents about the administration of its former African colonies, with no plans to put any of it online, and worse, if you don't know Portuguese. You just have to learn Portuguese, travel to Lisbon, and spend a couple of weeks working through a lot of paper.
Are you adequate?
...Mostly examples of bull shit, and thus the real problem is created.... not knowledge overload but the problem of separating the bull shit from valid knowledge and even further the separation of core knowledge from scope of valid knowledge.
2 /www.worldgame.org/wwwproject/index.shtml
For example: the application/result of a mathmatical algorythim is valid only if it applies to a non-bull shit objective of the point of doing the calculation.
You can memorize all the calculations results but if you know/understand the core knowledge of mathmatics and the mathmatical elements relative to the subject of the calculation, you can calculate it if and when you need to know it. That's alot less knowledge to need to know.
Another example: Autocad (and this applies to other programs as well) provides many many user functions, but for a beginner to start being productive with it, there is the core set of functions (might be called short cuts or tips and tricks) the user can apply and get productive rather quickly.
Example can be given for many other areas of knowledge, including politics, religion, (things though verifiably mostly bull shit), etc..
Core knowledge, what it is, is the knowldge that allows calculating out valid information when you need to consider it. And it is always relative to life, specifically your life and the environment you live in.
Core knowledge is much tighter, integrated and to some degree self verifiable. Not to be confused with fabricated knowledge requiring self supported dependancies --- the logic of an addict for example.
The Bush administration lacks core knowledge and in all of its fabrication of justifying its faulty actions the complexity of knowledge has grown to be more than it or the NSA can keep straight.
So if the NSA can process such massive amounts of information, for terrorist threats, from internet communications to phone taps, etc...Then the article is not real, but bull shit itself, but if the NSA is looking for "how to do it" then the article is an "RFC"
And according to an ACLU mailout there is the "Faith in god" bush direction to try and get people to ignore the mess.
So what light does all this put the article this thread is about, in?
There is not a knowledge overload, there is a bullshit overload.
When was the last time you did a search on something thru the internet and found mostly links to unrelated stuff?
Core knowledge vs. bullshit overload.
WHAT IF: all that you may believe about the war on terrorism, Bush, Bin Laden (who has forgoten about him?), dot com boom and bust, Enron, Worldcom, world economic problems,etc..... What if this knowledge overload has a much simpler core knowledge.
A core knowledge that would have allowed you to accurately predict (no majic involved, just logic and simple mathmatics) all of it? Or even now enlighten you, reduce your knowledge overload on all of this?
Well there is!
Do a search on "Trillion Dollar bet" and read the transcript. Follow the money.
When you understand why Ted Turner said the attack on the WTC, Pentagon, White House was an act of despration, then you will know there really is not a war on terrorism, least not how you probably think. But rather a resistant against those who do others wrong.
When you understand this, then you too will see the solution and who is really guilty of terrorism (a fraction of a percent of the 6 billion population on this planet)...
To remove terrorism, stop doing others wrong and start doing others right...
http://www.unesco.org/education/tlsf/theme_a/mod0
CORE KNOWLEDGE --- its alot simpler and far from overload.
In a true overload system they key is to make information easy to scan and discard when junk. Witness WebRSS... a presentation style in the form of an rss reader. You have instant access to everything (in topic), it's quickly scannable & discardable, and you're left with the good stuff.
Most people don't use a feed reader or know what rss is so this kinda skips over trying to educate people about how to use it... just give it to them in that form.
I see the Internet as the very beginning of something big in human evolution - we're getting to the point where we can control our own evolution.
At the moment, we all depend on our computers to search for data on the web, hence the question. But as we master quantum storage, I believe we will all have the ability to have all the info on the web surgically connected to our brains - thus we will 'know' all the info on the web. No more searching (well unless you count searching our own brains).
Do what I say, cuz I said it.
-Meatwad
I just love being able to look up anything at Wikipedia. If I wonder about something, instead of Google for it, visit 15 pages and gather information, I just look it up on Wikipedia and get alot of useful information collected in one place.
I would call what you're referring to intelligence overload :)
Information overload, to me, is simple having too much information to study in a given time. In other words, even if you can understand all of the information, there is simply too much to keep track of.
The problem here is that information on websites is infinite, not that the information is particularly complex. For example, I have RSS feeds from about 40 websites, along with personal emails and mailing list emails to keep track of. I just about manage to do that, with the great RSS and email software in KDE.
Now, ideally, I would like to keep track of MUCH more information: many more websites, many more mailing lists, many video tutorials for blender, and programming, and conferences and presentations, etc., all in spare time besides my day job.
RSS simply doesn't cut it for this sort of information load. What ever happened to the symantic web anyway?
http://www.happynews.com/
Their credo ""Real News, Compelling Stories, Always Positive" is what you'll find on HappyNews.com. We believe virtue, goodwill and heroism are hot news. That's why we bring you up-to-the-minute news, geared to lift spirits and inspire lives. Add in a diverse team of Citizen Journalists reporting positive stories from around the world, and you've got one happy place for news.".
"The moment "pride" is lost, "freedom" is also lost." - Ramza.
My short term memory is shit! I find it very very hard to recall thoughts from just a few minutes or seconds ago.
I have a very high IQ but didn't always use to haev memory problems. It sort of started in the high school era.
At the age of 7 I was given a Commodore 64/128 as well and have grown up with computers all my life. I was on Prodigy and then the BBSs back in the day (early 90's), and one of the first people I know of my age to get on the Net. I am 23 now.
I hated high school mostly because my natural sleeping pattern is from about 2-am until noon and of course high school demands performance at those hours. I found it hardest to recall information while sleep deprived or while off of my normal sleep pattern.
I have had roughly 14 surgeries all under general anesthetic, half before the age of 5 and the other half after the age of 14 for something unrelated to my brain. I have to keep wondering if being under the knife that many times has effected my memory? Or is it the fact that I work in the broadcast and live audio industry, always fast moving and have to think on my feet a lot? Or is it the fact Ive grown up with a computer? Or is it beacuse I am not trying? Or is it because of genetics? Both my grandmother and her twin sister have moderate to severe amnesia in their 70's.
I am open to thoughts on this.
Libertas in infinitum
In the "small world" category, I just finished a commentary on this article http://btsawyer.com/btblog/?p=33 in my blog.
I'm inclined to go with "Internet lazy" but I think we first have to remove entertainment from the information category. We also have to remove a lot of other things like ads from Web pages in order to get to the information underneath. I don't mean physically remove since I like having someone pay to keep CNN.com online.
Strip away the ads and popups and self-promotion and you see how much information you actually get on say, netscape.com. So-called news shows on TV divide the screen into so many segments you can hardly grok everything in one glance. Flashing bulletins "War on Christmas enters 2005th year" are no more than a distraction, IMHO.
I also have a bad short-term memory. The Internet can be a wonderful source of information. It also can be the source for incredibly poor and lop-sided information.
Corporations on the Internet only respond if they feel like it and only tell you what they want you to know-that is not a good situation. There is no easy way for the average person to reduce some searches from 80 pages of results and often the pages you find have been switched or moved when you follow the links. That is why many young adults prefer to use the fast, efficient library instead of the Internet. Given the current Internet situation, I do not blame them.
This needs to be done:
1) Clean up the bad links and the ones that obviously been switched.
2) Add an easy way for people to reduce searches by adding ways to do that to the web browser.
3) Corporations stop "Lording it Over You" and only telling you what they want you to hear (I know "good luck").
John W....
... that technology is expanding, to meat the needs of the expanding technology.
I am a teacher. I have spent the past two years revamping my curriculum to meet the needs of high schoolers who do not know how to use the information technology available at their fingertips. In conjunction with the librarians at my school, we have just completed a K-12 information literacy scope and sequence that covers the following:
*How to access information (digital & print)
*How to critically evaluate information (includes vetting sources)
*How to use the information for academic use
In the scope and sequence,we also include:
*How to use information for personal use
*The importance of accurate information in a democratic society (includ. 1st Amendment rights)
*Ethical behavior (which includes not only accuracy but also attributions,citations, copyright and fair use, plagiarism)
*Positive contributions to the learning community
We hope to incorporate this scope and sequence into all classes for the next academic year. In addition to print sources, my school library has invested in reliable databases and online resources for students to use.
Ask your children's school and public librarians what they are doing with information literacy. Support your local libraries to subscribe to reliable databases. Maybe even teach a class at your local library on how to vet information found online!