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."

Comments

Too early.

[Anonymous Coward]

I will come back to the thread later, when there are several hundred comments to read.

every so often, you have to turn off the toys.

[swschrad]

perspective is import... OOOHHHH, shiny.

TV?

[phantomfive]

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!

Re:TV?

[CrashandDie]

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.

Re:TV?

[hedwards]

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.

On the other hand

[seanadams.com]

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.

Re:On the other hand

[GSV Eat Me Reality]

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.

  Or, if you're subject to both tendencies, you can suffer from Extreme Informational Cognitive Dissonance Syndrome and eventually end up playing Tetris all day.

  Yes, one can suffer from both at once. As an example, it's like spending four intense hours searching forums trying to find that one variable setting you need to make xorg work properly, then you promptly get distracted by an youtube video someone sent you in your email, and forget to finish the build for two days.

  This is of course just a hypothetical situation, nothing of the sort has ever happened to anyone...

Bull.

[Wyatt Earp]

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.

Re:Bull.

[PopeRatzo]

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.

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.

Re:Bull.

[Wyatt Earp]

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.

Re:Bull.

[Darinbob]

The article confuses "data" with "important recorded stuff". Long before Twitter people would say "I'm going to lunch now". People used to have long discussions in person without the internet being involved. People crunched lots of numbers too. The difference is that now it's recorded and saved.

What is more accurate is to say that "we're archiving more useless data now than we ever used to before".

sort of like Huxley's distopia

[FudRucker]

Huxley feared we would be drowned by a sea of irrelevance

Herbert Simon

[QuietLagoon]

In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

-- Herbert Simon (1916 - 2001)

A walk through the forest is informationally rich.

[amanicdroid]

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.

finding/processing the information isn't free

[Trepidity]

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."

Re:Fuck Islam!

[Itninja]

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?

To be fair...

[darkwing_bmf]

We probably spend more time thinking about victims in Afghanistan than we did before we had the Internet.

Having too much DATA can distract you from info

[rcamans]

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...

So basically, we should stop reading slashdot?

[SmallFurryCreature]

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.