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."

Comments

Information overload a diagnosed problem?

[dada21]

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.

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.

Re:Information overload a diagnosed problem?

[thegrassyknowl]

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?

I find that the younger generation can't ADD (with the + sign) unless they have a computer or calculator handy. Ask them to add two wierd numbers (127 and 67, for example) and see how long it takes to get an answer without letting them use a calculator or their computer (hint, you'll be waiting until the devil skates to work).

I got my first computer at about 3 or 4 as well; a C64. I went through school at the time when using a computer in school was considered a treat. In primary school it was less than an hour a week at school (except for the special class I did once a week which was an hour of extra-curricular programming activities that was organised by the school for a few of us with exceptional computing skills).

In high school it was only a couple of hours a week in school that we were allowed to use the computers. Basic typing and computer skills were all that were taught (boooooorrrrring to someone who had advanced C knowledge by the time they were 13). There was also diversity in the platform, with some DOS PCs, some Windows PCs and some BBC micros (my fav game ever was on the BBC but i can't remember the damned name of it), Microbees, Commodore 64s, etc. These days it's all Windows PCs everywhere so the students aren't even learning how to think about what they're doing; they're just learning "click here, drag there".

I think that in the current generation memory problems and total lack of basic skills like handwriting and mathematics are lacking. It's all to do with the gotta-be-online nature of the world these days.

Re:Information overload a diagnosed problem?

[pipingguy]

Even the wife acknowledges my memory is worse now than it was 10 years ago

I'm going to assume by that that you mean *your* wife. If this is the case, don't bother to go looking for other reasons for your loss of short-term memory. Dishonestly responding, "no" to the question, "Do I look fat in this?" 20,000 times not only undermines one's credibility (due to forced living in a fantasy world), it also leads to early senility (due to your brain overloading the truth/error correction circuit).

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Or..

[Bananatree3]

You could say the heck with it all, join the Amish community and say the electron doesn't exist.

Re:Or..

[HD Webdev]

For the record, the Amish community knows about the electron but CHOOSES not to have much to do with it.

The Amish people can speak for themselves here at slashdot, thank you very much.

from the article

[peculiarmethod]

"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.

On the contrary

[arrrrg]

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.

Re:On the contrary

[0xC0FFEE]

I think the real boom is still to come, in the form of real AI.

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

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.

Overload?

[drdanny_orig]

I gotta believe that it takes very little information to overload the average reader of USA Today.

Re:If Google can't find it...

[HermanAB]

If you can't find yourself in Google, do you exist?

Required Reading

[Quirk]

Luria, A. R., the great Russian psychologist, wrote of memory and information overload in his widely known book The Mind of a Mnemonist.

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.

Other issues with information overload

[SocialEngineer]

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.

Knowledge overload/sensory overload

[Weatherman-au]

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.

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.

Just remember....

[rune2]

Hard work often pays off after time but laziness aways pays off now...

Re:Urgh?

[xiando]

leading search companies like "those we have partnerships with, mutual investments with or who have a high percentage of our shares" --same old story..

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.

RSS Helps me

[bahamat]

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.

Personally, I'm tired of information.

[Mancat]

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.

Food Overload or Farming Lazy?

[SpecialAgentXXX]

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 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.