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.
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.
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.
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...
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!
...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.