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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History

[Philomathie]

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.

oh, please

[misanthrope101]

Try growing up in a small town, hours from a decent library or bookstore, in an age with no internet, no Amazon.com, no Project Gutenberg. The local library had no electronic databases, not even a searchable card catalog. It was hell for a kid curious about just about everything. I was reduced to reading Reader's Digest. Reader's Digest, for the love of God! The horror, the horror!

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.

Schools

[Infonaut]

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.

Re:Information overload a diagnosed problem?

[anagama]

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 was talking with someone just yesterday about knowledge. It seems to me that what is far more important than storing a bunch of facts in the brain, is storing the methods and means by which one can find those facts. For example -- if you memorized the population of Angola in high school 20 years ago, that's a useless waste of brain space because the answer changes from year to year and more importantly, because that data can be retrieved from various sources without taxing your personal resources (brain).

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.

Re:Information overload a diagnosed problem?

[servognome]

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.

The Amish may have the right idea

[cutecub]

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.