Slashdot Mirror
Having Too Much Information Can Narrow Your Focus
CeruleanDragon writes
"This excerpt sums up Dave Pell's article at NPR pretty well: 'Google's Eric Schmidt recently stated that every two days we create as much information as we did from the beginning of civilization through 2003. Perhaps the sheer bulk of data makes it easier to suppress that information which we find overly unpleasant. Who has got time for a victim in Afghanistan or end-of-life issues with all these tweets coming in?' It's a valid point. If it's not tweets or Facebook posts, it's lengthy forum arguments or reading news articles from the time you walk in the door at work until you're ready for bed at night, and realizing you didn't actually accomplish anything else. Sometimes too much information can get in the way of living and can bury otherwise important things."
Reading news articles...like this one. Now we just need a lengthy forum argument and we'll have a perpetual motion machine!
... now I collect information. What's wrong with that?
I will come back to the thread later, when there are several hundred comments to read.
perspective is import... OOOHHHH, shiny.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
sounds like a day in the life of average slashdotter. honestly this is too many days of my life lately. I think I'll go write some code.
I am not in anyway affiliated with Max Cannon
If it's not Tweets or Facebook posts, it's lengthy forum arguments or reading news articles from the time you walk in the door at work until you're ready for bed at night, and realizing you didn't actually accomplish anything else
RIght, because before the information explosion on the internet, people never watched TV from the time they walked in the door until they were ready for bed at night, accomplishing nothing. The newest shiny toy is always a distraction, if you aren't going to learn to overcome being distracted, there will always be a new thing to ruin your productivity.
And if you disagree with me, by golly, I'll stay here and argue with you until the sun goes down if I have to!
Qxe4
Most of that info is worthless junk anyway, like the inane stuff in Facebook and similarly stupid sites.
When faced with an engineering problem, I can dip into the vast sea of information at my fingertips and instantly find answers instead of spending all day flipping through hardbacks at computer literacy, bullshitting with local sales reps to try and get copies of data sheets faxed to me, or just plain wasting time figuring out something out that's already been solved. This leaves me more time to work on the interesting stuff, or fart around on Facebook if I feel like it. I'm failing to see the downside. If you're a distractible person you can be even more distracted if you want to. If you're a productive person you can be even more productive if you want to. More information, please.
The bulk of information created before the advent of the Printing Press has been lost. We only have fragments of data from the Roman Republic and Western Empire. Same goes for a host of empires and states.
We create more bytes of data and more copies of data while we track things much closer, we really don't know what was created before. We don't know all the works of art, mundane information and data saved by the Romans, Greeks, Han, Aztecs, Maya, Egyptians or Celts, or any of the thousands of other civilizations.
it's lengthy forum arguments
I didn't argue in a forum today.
Huxley feared we would be drowned by a sea of irrelevance
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
-- Herbert Simon (1916 - 2001)
Now let me just jump straight into reading the comments, and ignore the article all together.
Yeah it gives a new meaning to ADHD. You start reading something on slashdo.... Hey ars technica is reviewing tha.... oooo gotta retweet thi.... dammit! I missed my vanpool. It almost happened.
For the longest time I couldn't understand why anyone would troll the Slashdot news articles. It's relatively easy to get positive mods on your comments if you can post something half intelligent in the first few minutes of an article going up, as long as you write in a clear and concise manner.
Except today I realized something;
No one upmodded my comments, so there weren't as many responses to my comments. There weren't as many responses so I didn't visit slashdot as much. I didn't visit slashdot as much and I actually got some coding done today.
It all makes perfect sense to me now. By having a lower karma on /., I'd be a better employee. I'm surprised it took me so long to see it.
The world is an information-rich place. It was before we showed up and after we leave. The only difference we make is that we intentionally record data.
When you walk on the beach your interpret the sound waves of information as noise because you're unable to comprehend any deeper meaning than the existence of waves crashing nearby.
I'm sorry. What were we talking about again?
One problem is that "information" is largely supposed to make things easier by giving you access to something that was already done: someone else already went out there and collected meticulous information on frog populations, so it's easier to get access to that information than go out and count frogs yourself. But as information multiplies, sometimes it really is easier to just count the damn frogs instead of making sense of the voluminous and often inconsistent frog literature.
Diderot noticed this in 1755, in a famous passage:
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
You don't care sufficiently about issues I care about, and I believe popular social media is the culprit!
+5 Irony
"...reading news articles from the time you walk in the door at work until you're ready for bed at night, and realizing you didn't actually accomplish anything else. " - hmmm, as long as the people signing the paycheck don't realize that i didn't actually accomplish anything else and slashdot keeps feeding me news and lengthy forum arguments i don't mind :-)
The only communication device I carry with me on Lake Michigan is my emergency VHF radio.
...you've wasted another moment in your life. Could've become a millionaire, but oh well.
This isn't news. The book is called Future Shock.
Don't you really mean the opposite?
You want to have fuck all three of those things? I mean one is ethereal, one is a long-dead man, and one is a religion. But hey, what rings your bell man. I am sure there are many Muslims who may not swing that way, but who appreciate the thought. How can one person have so much love in their heart?
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
One of the major things that annoy me about networking services like Facebook and Twitter is the amount of useless information that is generated. Just generating information is not good enough, it needs to be useful, beneficial.
Who's got time for a victim in Afghanistan or end-of-life issues with all these Tweets coming in?' It's a valid point. If it's not Tweets or Facebook posts, it's lengthy forum arguments or reading news articles from the time you walk in the door at work until you're ready for bed at night
Now some jackhole Senator is going to start campaigning about how Slashdot is responsible for civilian deaths in Afghanistan, the current economic crisis, and the elderly having inadequate welfare just to cover up his latest sex scandal. Way to kill off the competition NPR. =P
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
"... Sometimes too much information can get in the way of living and can bury otherwise important things."
Too much information always gets in the way. Napoleon Hill was the original mass-market "motivational speaker". He dedicated his life to teaching a science of success. One of the key aspects of Hill's philosophy is to focus on one's "definite major purpose" in life. What are you doing with your life? Some people are artists, others look to promote public health, others are builders or teachers.There are as many purposes as there are people.
This excerpt comes from Napoleon Hill's 9-cd package, "Your Right To Be Rich".
I've cut down on the amount of crap I read online since I heard this little bit a month ago.... I kind of keep current, but I don't care about minutiae like I used to, and when I catch myself reading about something that doesn't matter for me, I either start practicing my speedreading, or just close the tab.
I was listening to an interview on NPR while in my car. The point made was that most human beings have to work to pay attention, and can be easily distracted. It does not come naturally. As an example they explained that listening to the radio while driving made you a poorer driver. This is because most people's brains are incapable of processing that much information at one time. Just as this was said I started hearing car horns behind me. I had switched my attention from driving to the radio interview about paying attention while driving. I had stopped at a green light.
I believe that most of us have a physiological limit of how much sensory input we can process at once, and how fast we can switch our full attention from one task to the next. The distractions I have right now: the blackberry dinging, the "new mail" flag popping up, the "bell on screen 1" messages, gathering status of several simultaneous running jobs, and writing this post. Something has to be tuned out or lots of work is completed with little progress. I often use music (without lyrics) to drown out distractions, simplify the amount of messages going to my brain, allowing me to pay attention to one task at a time. I usually do this when the "background noise level" is so severe I finally recognize what is happening.
This is why I love /. Summaries for the weak minded and highly-distracted, like me!
Is now worthless by plenty.
There is more value in one essay from Plato, than in all the blogs and comments that are writ each day.
This one included.
We may be creating a ton of data, but that is not the equivalent of a ton of information. And even a lot of that is probably information in such a limited scope (ie, access records to your cats blog page) that in the macro sense it is just noise.
Or is that Information Data?
Whichever, Schmidt has it wrong.
We're producing reams of data. Its information content is probably log(log(O)) as great as its data content, since log(O) is pretty much how information and data relate in the first place, and we're keeping what seems like exponentially more data than we would have thought to save in the pre-nearly-free-storage days.
So this explains why the Global Warming groups hide their data/programs.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
What a shame. Shouldn't it be the other way around? Tweets are twaddle.
Perhaps we're all easily distracted - or need to be distracted. Perhaps wars half a world away or end-of-life issues are too sad, distant or abstract, to be a priority for thought, but they are there and they are real.
As I've mentioned before: I know the world simply disappeared for me when my wife was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer in November 2005. All I could see and hear was her for the next seven weeks until she died in my arms. Twenty years together and a simple headache changed the course of two lives forever. Now I have trouble seeing or hearing anything. The future is gone and my star shines no more.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
See subject.
See my comments in this thread here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1746980&cid=33177866 in the article on the CIA developer going open source. One point I make is that the USA spends literally billions of dollars on developing ways for people in the intelligence community to make sense of a deluge of information; why should such tools not be FOSS and available to every person to help think through complex issues and improve their local community? See also Doug Engelbart's aspirations for Augment. I am working on such FOSS tools here as I have spare time:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I'm sorry to hear that. This is what little help I can provide:
"Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals" by Thomas Moore
http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Nights-Soul-Finding-Through/dp/1592400671
"When it comes to spiritual growth, we humans are solar-seeking beings; eager for the bright lights of clarity and the bliss of illumination. Paradoxically, we all need to walk through the shadow of the dark night in order to discover a life worth living, according to psychotherapist and spiritual commentator Thomas Moore. Unlike depression, which is more of an emotional state, Moore calls the dark night a slow transformation process, which is fueled by a profound period of doubt, disorientation and questioning. Ultimately, a journey into the dark night will reshape the very meaning of your life. As a self-proclaimed "lunar type," Moore is comfortable leading his clients and readers into the shadows, where ambiguities and mysteries lurk around every corner. He describes the dark night journey in stages, starting with feeling distant from your life even as you continue to go through the motions. The second phase is "liminality," meaning living on the threshold between the known self and the unknown self. This is perhaps the most uncomfortable phase as the dark night may "take you away from the cultivation and persona you have developed in your education and from family learning," he explains. After dwelling in this murky darkness, there's a stage of "re-incorporation," in which one integrates the profound inner transitions into daily life. Like a tour guide to the underworld, Moore leads readers through all these phases, offering tools and rituals for making the journey more tolerable or at least more meaningful. He also speaks to the many arenas and stages of life in which we might find ourselves stumbling through the dark, with chapters on marriage, parenting, sexuality, creativity and health. The scope is ambitious, and at times the structure seems disjointed--but this is perhaps Moore's best contribution since Care of the Soul, proving once again that he is a wise and formidable spiritual teacher. (Gail Hudson)"
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I think more or less this guy is just whining that people don't pay attention to what he thinks is important. I see no evidence that people aren't capable of paying attention to important things anymore. However not everyone considers everything important the same as everyone else. Also there's the simple fact that when talking about bad news, after awhile you get dull to it and you don't want to hear anymore, you want an escape. I certainly remember that on 9/11. After watching the news on it for a few hours I had to tune to Comedy Central, one of the few networks doing regular programming. While I certainly felt the events were important, I couldn't handle any more. It was overwhelming, I needed some escapism and something to try and make me laugh.
Something else he's missing is that with the increase in information has come an increase in our ability to sift and filter. So while there are mountains of information out there, you can filter it to only what it important to you much easier. It isn't as though you are forced to wade through irrelevance, unless you want to.
Next time you encounter a problem you think that you might find a solution to by googling for someone else's already existing solution - just read Plato instead.
You wouldn't want to use some worthless solution someone "writ" on a forum or a blog somewhere, now would you?
And tacking on that "Hey, my comment is worthless too..." is the same thing as asking loaded questions.
BTW, this particular post's monetary value may be only 17004 dollars, 8250 Euros and 99147 Yen, but its cultural value is priceless.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
your interpret the sound waves of information as noise because you're unable to comprehend any deeper meaning than the existence of waves crashing nearby.
I hear that, loud and clear (no pun intended, ever). I remember when I tried to make the most quiet computer possible and found that, while the computer was dead-quiet, I couldn't concentrate worth a damn. Years later, I discovered that while my teen years had me throwing way too many fans in a computer because it was the hip thing to do at the time (loud meant fast in 1997), I got a whole lot more done because the noise drowned out the other sounds around me.
I now have a ten node renderfarm I like to work right next to. It was built to be quiet by server standards, but with almost a hundred fans, it's still loud enough to drown out most of the airplanes that fly over in the process of landing at the airport three miles away.
In a world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king--and the two-eyed man is a heretic.
Sturgeon astutely pointed out that 90% of everything is crap. In this era of information overload it has become impossible to sensibly sort out the good 10% from the crap 90% so the only rational solution is to narrow your focus to the first few non-crap pieces of information you happen to stumble upon. We nerdy types often berate non techies for the non-optimal way they use technology and yet for the vast majority of people life is just too short to figure out the "best" way to protect your files against antivirus or the quickest way to rename a group of files. It is entirely rational that most people latch on to the first method they stumble across which sort of works and stick with it.
We RECORD more information. Information has been produced in rough proportion to the population at pretty much the same rate as ever.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
We probably spend more time thinking about victims in Afghanistan than we did before we had the Internet.
I think he just has a crush on Cat Stevens.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
60-70 years ago, who heard of Afghanistan? Who heard about a victim in a city one state away, let alone had time for victims in the same city?
rosetta stone rosetta stone rosetta stone language rosetta stone language rosetta stone spanish rosetta stone spanish abercrombie and fitch abercrombie and fitch Abercrombie Fitch Abercrombie Fitch Abercrombie Clothing Abercrombie Clothing pandora pandora pandora schmuck pandora schmuck pandora armband pandora armband tiffany tiffany tiffany jewellery tiffany jewellery tiffany rings tiffany rings
Sometimes narrow focus is a good thing. Just because there is all of that information available does not mean that it is good or reliable. When we learn which sources are consistently reliable we can focus on them and ignore the unreliable ones. Thus we have narrowed our focus in a positive way. I'm assuming here that the choice of reliable sources is made intelligently and objectively (as is humanly possible) and not just cherry picked to suit personal/subjective outlooks. Of course I did not read TFA. Doing so would have been way too wide angle. Fish-eye almost.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
We do not create much information each day. Information is actually useful stuff.
What we create tons of each day is useless data and distractions from reality.
Tons of BS and actual anti-information (lies and errors).
Tons of anti-data.
Tons of anti-reality.
Like for instance the title of this thread...
or most anything else on slashdot...
wake up and hold your nose
I really focus on very few things only.........
New Economic Perspectives
> every two days we create as much information as we did from the beginning of civilization through 2003
Bollocks. We create none; information is ordered matter and/or energy. It can only be transformed. We may be making more of it more readily accessible to ourselves, but it was energy before that, matter before that, etc. If we created information directly there'd be less problem with carbon dioxide now and Google wouldn't be planning an arctic climate data center just for the cold air. And don't bother with the narrow viewpoint caused by belief in thermodynamics instead of understanding; if entropy ruled locally you'd have gone from egg and sperm to waste.
Information can interact and generate apparently simplistic structures etc. out of complex dynamics, just as you appear to be a body rather than the similar set of complex dynamic interactions that you are. Don't confuse apparent structure with underlying dynamics or emergent properties with actual physical manifestation. Information metabolism.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
We don't create more information now, we share more information now. We have always created mass amounts of information. We have just recently found an infinite forum to post the information. If a tree falls in the woods, does it make information?
I have ADHD you insensitive clods.
Okay seriously, because of that condition, reading that article just made me think "No shit, sherlock". Because I get that on a much smaller scale, so it felt pretty obvious to me ;)
...or something like that.
Reducing my information intake is precisely why I never RTFA.
Who decides what's important? Sure. The politically correct opinion would be that some victim in Afghanistan is at least if not more important than the local news from my own town and as such I should pay attention to it. I think this is wrong. Of course that suffering is very bad and deserves attention, but TO ME it is just not important because it does not have anything to do with me, not even remotely. I'm willing to bet that deep down most people feel this way to some degree. I'm just more honest about it than most.
I always hate it when there happens some disaster in a far away place and it's the only thing the tv news covers for a week, or more. Yes. I know something terrible has happened. Now stop harassing me about it.
The great thing about the current system is that we can sift through information to filter out the things we're interested in. There's no shame in that.
You see me using an 'equal' sign, AKA ' = '? Maybe you should check out this story.
That particular post was worth 17004 dollars AND 8250 Euros AND 99147 Yen.
This one is worth 5672 dollars, 4571 Australian dollars and 65001 Cuban pesos (in the form of 3-pesos Che bills).
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I experience this often: if you go looking for information on a procedure, like tethering a smart phone, you find not one reputable source with all the answers, but hundreds or thousands of competing similar answers.
Each of these misses some vital piece of the information, but has the rest.
It's like life needs an editor or an ego to take in all this great information, filter out the crap and fix the errors, and produce one definitive solution.
Instead we have informational chaos.
Futurist Traditionalism
The difference is that the brain accepts the sound of crashing waves as background information that requires little thought.
The argument is that there is now so much information that "demands" thought, that it overwhelms us, and we start "dropping packets"... including packets containing important information.
He has a valid point. More information != better informed. I could spend all day following celeb drivel and not know what days it is.
BUT I object to the "caring about some victim in Pakistan". I can be very well informed, and still not give a shit. Why does being informed having to mean I should care? There are plenty of rich muslim nations, let them donate some for a change. They wanted their own Red Cross, let it take care of their own. You see, being well informed means knowing that the Red Moon isn't all that well organized and Muslim nations that insisted it be created are very poor donors (pledges mean nothing, money actually paid out counts).
So, if Iran doesn't care, why should I?
Being well informed I also know that any money I donate personally in such a country will not reach the people I intend it to go to. An uninformed person might think ten bucks goes to feed a starving family. An informed person knows it goes to some tribal chiefs new car.
It is tricky isn't it? An uninformed person doesn't have a bleeding heart because they don't know about it. An informed person heart isn't bleeding because he knows the background.
Perhaps what the article writer wants is to have people informed JUST enough so they agree with his vision of the world. After all, someone who thinks exactly like me must be very well informed and highly intelligent. If a person who thinks exactly like me was a blittering idiot... well that just isn't possible. I might be thought to be a blittering idiot and clearly I am not!
Just what is living a life. What is an accomplishment? If a person enjoys twittering, then isn't that living the life he wants to life? Some say an achievement is to go forth and reproduce. If you haven't got a dozen kids or more, you are failing. But because someone else thinks that, does that mean everyone should think that.
Life is futile. No matter what you do, you die and the way our society works we need more passive people then revolutionaries. If everyone made a difference in the world, we would never get done reading the newspaper.
99% of people life in their own small part of the world, barely touching the rest of it. They collect matchboxes or know every soccer match ever played and then they die and it is gone. They mattered in their own little world but in the global scheme of things? Not so much. That is life. Learn to accept it or run for president... and what will Clinton and Bush be known for? Getting bush in and global war. I think someone scoring 1000 tweets is a lot less harmful.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
FTFA: "reality of what is happening — and what can happen — in a war that affects and involves all of us. I would rather confront readers with the Taliban’s treatment of women than ignore it.". Time Managing Editor Richard Stengel.
I will come back to the thread later, when there are several hundred comments to read.
Not much to write about an article claiming that we should be looking at the big picture while in reality deviously trying to obscure the real big picture by appealing to our emotions and instincts to care and protect. As many scientists need to know - It's hard to put emotions aside, and look at the raw numbers to see just who is hurting most and why. That is the only way to look at the "big picture", not this crap story which is doing the opposite.
BTW, here is another CIA Red Cell PR campaign, this time directed at Americans more than anyone else, appealing to the almighty $.
One problem is that "information" is largely supposed to make things easier by giving you access to something that was already done: someone else already went out there and collected meticulous information on frog populations, so it's easier to get access to that information than go out and count frogs yourself. But as information multiplies, sometimes it really is easier to just count the damn frogs instead of making sense of the voluminous and often inconsistent frog literature. Diderot noticed this in 1755, in a famous passage:
"As long as the centuries continue to unfold, the number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed in nature as it will be to find it hidden away in an immense multitude of bound volumes."
I disagree. What we actually find is that paragons are held up and improved upon and our search skills have exceeded what Diderot expected. Diderot foresaw in a library of a billion books that if you wanted to know how tall the local mountain was, it may actually be faster to simply go to the local mountain and plot it's height than to actually wade through all those books for the precise piece of information.
However, in reality, it didn't end up like that at all. We type "What is the height of Blue Mountain?" in Google and the first link spits out "2320 feet." It isn't faster at all to go examine nature for myself. If anything in spite of increased information our speed of going through books has been amplified to an even greater degree.
And as for frogs. There probably are paragon studies of them, best-done studies. There are also probably studies where people spent 20 years studying local frog populations and things do time-consuming and in depth that it would take a whole life to replicate, but which can be called up on a whim in seconds.
Diderot was really, really wrong.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
"It's not because my mind is made up that I don't want you to confuse me with any more facts.
"It's because my mind isn't made up. I already have more facts than I can cope with.
"So SHUT UP, do you hear me? SHUT UP!"
The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner
-kgj
...because you have to sort out the garbage from the truth after you narrow down what you're looking for. and that requires effort. That doesn't mean all information is low value or has negative value. Take a look at the Internet. I might google specialist information, but i'm much more likely to go to a specialist source such as arxiv for astronomy or pubmed for medical literature because I know that information is higher quality than every nut job's take on Relativity or Immunology.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I haven't heard about any bus accidents in India lately. Have they stopped driving buses in India? I'm concerned about the current lack of such information coming out of India.
E Proelio Veritas.
"Look how many films from as late as the 1970s have already deteriorated and are lost." - by PopeRatzo (965947) * on Friday August 13, @07:04PM (#33246972) Homepage
See subject-line above, & the BBC lost a LOT (iirc, most of in fact) the entire Dr. Who series during the Patrick Troughton years (with that actor portraying "the Good Doctor") of the mid 1960's & into the early 1970's are gone/lost (1964-1973) as well as a good deal of the original actor's episodes starring William Hartnell also.
APK
P.S.=> Merely posting "another example thereof" is all with the example above, & mainly because I know there are more than a few Doctor Who fans around here like myself, and that this might interest they, as well as keeping on topic in reply here... apk
There is no "deeper meaning" to the sound of waves crashing. It is simply a consequence of a wave of seawater rolling into the shore. You can analyze it and try to discern the mechanism of the sound, but that doesn't make the sound information.
More accurately, you can look at the world as an undifferentiated mass of information, but you will be the poorer for it. Your focus is narrowed in the sense that the richness of experience, existence and interaction is dulled by being overly cerebral.
It asks for your attention. You make the choice to give it.
Mothers have had to deal with information overload for millenia, drivers for a century. The whole argument is asinine as it assumes that people lack the capability of filtering.
We've always ignored the suffering if it doesn't almost directly impinge on our own existence.
Little that we're doing is actually changing, merely the methods shift and sometimes speed events up.
*..the suffering of others if it..*
BTW, a two minute video on it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BLzvF6G4Ns
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
As presented, Eric would be being a bit obtuse.
In that period, we produce more data-- largely because Google and others record it.
Whether we should call a 100-fold increase in the amount of data we store about the moons of Saturn, "information," is another debate.
It is, however, "not the same thing" as the information produced, say, pre-2000.
Schmidt knows this.
At the same time, we have more information in the sense that more of the world's libraries and publications are more easily accessible to each of this.
This would seem to be in the end a good thing.
We also have more information in the sense that there are more scholars and others, writing.
This is not clearly good, as "publish or perish" may produce more noise than signal.
Finally, we have more, more good and more complex information-- the "information overload" talked about by Vannevar Bush.
This is a good thing-- we know a lot more-- but it's hard to keep up with. (In the middle of a war, which of ten reports on bubonic plague was Bush better off reading?)
All that said, the original article has little-to-nothing to do with this, or Eric Schmidt; anyone who has studied media in Third-Reich Germany, has a hint that this is not a new issue.
In other news, the sky is blue*, fire is hot and the earth is round.
*on earth from earth.
beginning of civiliz. to 2003...wow that's pretty recent...I say just turn off your computer and use it when it's important, when you need retrieval of specific info.