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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."
Huxley feared we would be drowned by a sea of irrelevance
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
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.
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 know, that makes me wonder how much of all this data that we're assuming is going to create a "permanent" archive is really going to be permanent.
I remember hearing about this kind of information overload back in the days when we backed up data on 200MB magnetic tapes. Those tapes got stacked in closets, pile upon pile, and nobody's ever going to look at most of them ever again.
I wonder if in 250 years people are going to say the same thing about our culture that you said about the pre-printing press days. A lot of books were printed that are gone forever. Magnetic coatings on mylar tape have flaked off. I've got a drawer full of old external drives. I'd bet that in 10 years if I were to plug one in, assuming there were still USB ports on computers then, that at least one of those drives is going to fail.
I'm not saying digital information isn't more persistent than print on vellum or impressions on clay cylinders, but at some point somebody has to care about that information if it's really going to be available to future generations. Look how many films from as late as the 1970s have already deteriorated and are lost. I just heard someone talking about the archives of the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Apparently, John Lennon and Paul McCartney were on together once in the early 60's. But because some production manager decided that tape was too expensive not to re-use, there are no copies left to see except about 2 minutes of 8mm film someone shot off of his TV set (at a different frame rate, too).
Even when you have a "permanent" record, at least today, it's not really permanent unless someone cares enough to maintain it.
You are welcome on my lawn.
There was alot of tape destruction and data loss in early TV, like pretty much the entire DuMont network, a ton of black and white stuff from the 40s, 50s and 60s.
Sure I create a ton of data during a day, but alot of those numbers are artificially high, I go out and google search and get hits back, all those google logo, ads on the side, those go millions of times a day, so is that "information" created each time it's uploaded and then downloaded?
So would information created in 1500 include the audio information of a town cryer? And how do we measure that bandwidth?
Saying things like "we create more information every hour than the Roman Empire did during the entire reign of Augustus" is kind of nonsense on a number of levels. /. in 2300
More p0rn is created every nano-second than was ever downloaded from 2000-2010.
There's another thing that makes me go "duh", even more than the TV argument.
Books.
I recently had a discussion with a friend who was amazed that these days, there was so little censoring in the 100+ page media. He wondered if our governments (or corporations as he now calls them) were getting sensible.
I've always been amazed at this train of thought. Books don't require censoring anymore. There are so many books coming out, every single day, that it would be impossible for the public at large to have a "big thought" pierce through the cloud of utter bollocks that is being printed. Books had a very big potential for spreading ideas around the world; or at least countries.
Everyone can get a book published and printed. Heck, I have two books in print, and three which are currently being "worked on" -- and I went the old way, with a publishing house taking me under their wing, and I have some semi-monk semi-guru who tries to inspire me on a weekly basis.
Today, you'd be hard pushed to find anything remotely interesting or exposing novel ideas. It seems to me that as a whole, the amount of information is only a repercussion of a more general trend: people don't give a shit. After having to deal with mortgage, picking up the kids and dealing with an ego-driven sadistic boss, people don't want to care, they don't want to think.
Does this mean that there has been a shift in the way people think, or the fact they want to unwind? No, not at all.
The only real difference, is that now, through the limited costs of publishing things around the world, the crap you used to hear at the local pub now comes right into your inbox, or some idiot in Vermont has enough free time to actually write a whole book around it.
The dynamics haven't changed one bit. Only how the media presents itself, and how the crap flows down the drain.
Actually, this is probably correct. It's been known for some time that sales end up going down in stores that offer too many choices. People will develop a strategy of just randomly grabbing a bottle of ketchup, picking the habitual brand or not buy any at all. More than a few choices tends to lead to paralysis and nobody ends up selling their item. I don't personally think that it's a stretch to extend that to information which only costs the time it takes to find and evaluate it.
It's worse now because we have some degree of control over it. When I was a kid and we only had a couple channels, that wasn't a problem, we could flip channels or turn it off, that was about it. These days though, we've got a ridiculous number of sources available and it's far more than the take it or leave it that we used to have. We can't really default to a whatever's on approach and end up with anything other than static.