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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."
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.
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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
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.
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.
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.
If you can't find yourself in Google, do you exist?
Oh well, what the hell...
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
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.
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.
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
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
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!
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.
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.
I drink to make other people interesting!
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.
...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.