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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."
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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.
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?
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.
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
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
Of course. In the meantime, software will become more powerful but the human element will still be required. In the same way you work for the boss but the boss still decides what you have to do... It's an organizational problem where the most useful allocation of ressources is to have the guy (or the thingy) with the overall "vision of what to do" to have the power to control the process of whatever is to accomplished.
Now, most of the time it is humans that are in this position. Still, things are starting to change however. Look at Google's ad program where their system regulates and optimizes the bidding process. Another example, circulation lights control the flow of traffic. The tendancy is to ever improving ressource allocations. Systems already control our behavior, be them mechanistic, legal or whatever. You would be a bit late to start complaining about that. Or maybe you're an anarchist at heart but never realized it. But make no mistake, modern society is a big organizational construct and unless you're not part of it, you're controlled in some way. What I'm saying is that, by design, (for most of us anyway) someone or something always has the upper hand on us. We're never completely free. This won't change, the level of control probably won't change much even. What's enforcing some of the actual organizational forces may change to be more automatized, but the net effect on your quality of life will be no worst than nil.
Now, suppose that true AI is developed, what will it change for us? Unless the AI is sentient and aspires to higher things (Equality, Justice, Happiness even) it is no more than a part of the organizational construct. This means several things. First that its current position in the societal scheme of things evolved to the current situation and that things are at a relatively stable equilibrium. Second, that the AI has a purpose, is accepted by the rest of the construct and has proven reliable. This might be utopic on my parts, but anything without a minimum usefulness is quickly discarded. On the other hand, things and processes that exist today have evolved over time, over many generations, with improvement being made along the way. The integration of those things and processes is a kind of co-evolution where acceptance redefines and precises the needs we have toward that thing or process. I can't see how AI or Magic or God is going to change this anytime soon, or ever.
Wow, end of year rant
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.
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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.
Now, before the internet, you would have to be familiar with librarys and card catalogs -- learning how to use those efficiently would have been of much greater value than memorizing a bunch of discrete facts. Today, the internet can provide a great deal of information in the same way, and learning how to navigate it through search tools is far more valuable than the individual bits of information a search turns up.
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. For people who need to be spoon fed every fact -- heck yeah, they'll be overloaded, but so what?
As to the parent poster -- don't chide yourself for being smart. It's smart to store only that information which you need immediately locally (and by locally I mean in your brain). Everything else belongs in an external but accessible database.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
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. For people who need to be spoon fed every fact -- heck yeah, they'll be overloaded, but so what?
I agree, further this is a generational thing. Children typically don't suffer from information overload because they learn how to best utilize the tools at their disposal. Growing up they have a base of experience on how to prioritize and maximize information. This is most evident in the use of technology, as it changes so quickly. They demonstrate greater productivity because they aren't constrained by how things used to be.
For example while older people are used to just calling for all situations, children have learned to maximize the text message function. Instead of calling 5 people for a get together, they just send out a message to all 5. They even develop a text message language for faster communication, which would mystify those not familar with it.
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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.
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.
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