Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: How Do You Avoid 'Information Overload' (wikipedia.org)
As we approach a holiday weekend and a brand new year, do we need to start carving out more time away from the internet? "I'm convinced the Internet (as in Slashdot) is making many people more lonely (and duller), not better," writes long-time Slashdot reader shanen:
I think the best description of the problem I've read is The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing To Our Brains by Nicholas Carr. Not exactly his formulation, but in brief I would say that too much information is overwhelming us...
Some approaches towards solutions appear in The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli (based on the German Die Kunst des klaren Denkens : 52 Denkfehler, die Sie besser anderen uberlassen. Again, better references would be greatly appreciated, especially as regards the problem of disaster porn overwhelming journalism.
New Media professor Clay Shirky has argued that "it's not information overload, it's filter failure." And Carr's original question was actually "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" though he still warned of the possibility that "the crazy quilt of Internet media" is remapping the neural circuitry in our brains. (And that "as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens.") The original submitter asked the question another way -- "Is deep thought possible in the Internet Age?" But it'd be interesting to hear what strategies are being used by Slashdot readers.
Leave your best answers in the comments. How do you avoid information overload?
Some approaches towards solutions appear in The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli (based on the German Die Kunst des klaren Denkens : 52 Denkfehler, die Sie besser anderen uberlassen. Again, better references would be greatly appreciated, especially as regards the problem of disaster porn overwhelming journalism.
New Media professor Clay Shirky has argued that "it's not information overload, it's filter failure." And Carr's original question was actually "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" though he still warned of the possibility that "the crazy quilt of Internet media" is remapping the neural circuitry in our brains. (And that "as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens.") The original submitter asked the question another way -- "Is deep thought possible in the Internet Age?" But it'd be interesting to hear what strategies are being used by Slashdot readers.
Leave your best answers in the comments. How do you avoid information overload?
Fox News
I didn't have enough attention span to read the summary. Could someone please summarise it?
"I'm convinced the Internet (as in Slashdot) is making many people more lonely (and duller)"
That's because you still hope to find some news for nerds, stuff that matters,
We old fucks gave that hope up years ago.
Easy answer.
Since Trump was elected I mostly ignore the news. Instead of CNN, I discovered all the Star Trek reruns on BBC America. No information overload and I'm happier.
Seriously. Turn off the phone and put it in a room you're not in. Then, step away from the computer (PC, tablets, laptops, whatever you use.)
Now, go do other things you've forgotten how to do.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
I give everything a time, then swap to something else. Here in the US, it takes some digging to get an accurate report about something since sources are heavily biased, so one's best bet is other countries (which have a slant, but tend to be neutral in the case of the issue mentioned.)
Sites like Reddit and Slashdot help, since eventually the truth relating to some allegation or some happening does work its way out, better than most mainstream media, and you will find insights (even if it is someone doing a troll attempt) that you won't find with the heavily filtered replies on "mainstream" news sites.
I exclusively read slashdot on the internet. That keeps the actual information content down.
Nullius in verba
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Seriously. Turn off the phone and put it in a room you're not in. Then, step away from the computer (PC, tablets, laptops, whatever you use.)
Now, go do other things you've forgotten how to do.
This is exactly my strategy. You know what's the very last thing most people need? A smart watch, or anything else that tethers them even more to the online world. I think people are forgetting how to experience life first hand.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
Phone is a phone and GPS and health tracker. No browser, no news, no mail.
No smartwatch.
Main personal device is a tablet. Browser, newsreader and social media app. eMail. eBooks.
"Computer" for work and last resort for personal stuff.
Notepad, reminders, calendar sync across all.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I'd probably give you the "Funny" mod if I ever saw a mod point, but the deeper truth underlying your joke is that the Internet was largely paid for by porn. I had that not from the horse's mouth, but straight from the owner of an early ISP.
However I'm not sure whether to classify the joke itself as the shallowest form of not thinking or as deep fantasies. I'm embarrassed that I can't recall the name of the anonymizing network... The thing with the little onion?
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
... it is exposing how shallow and stupid humanity always was. The reality is we live in a dystopian idiocracy. The reason the world is so corrupt is because the vast majority of the public falls for the lies of the rich and powerful and their corporations and vote against their own interests. That's reality.
I've been unemployed for years and I can't think if any friends who aren't talking to me.>/p> Maybe you need better friends.
I've felt for a while that there has been a steady drumbeat in the culture to be "engaged" and "informed" and now "woke." There's no respect for someone who says "I work 50 hours a week plus commute, I don't give a shit about $HEADLINE_X. I am going to grab some beer and enjoy $ALCOHOL_COMPATIBLE_ACTIVITY instead of worrying about shit that I can't fix."
But that person is actually speaking a pretty hardcore truth 99% of the time, and the effects of denigrating it are toxic. Here's a good example...
How well do you know the local police force's reputation? There are plenty of people who shriek "da police, da police, fuck da police" like there aren't something like over 3k departments with very different cultures. Yet how many people, not knowing much of anything about the reputation of their local police looks at some shit that went down several states away and resents their local police? A lot. You know what that is? It's not woke, it's fucking braindead.
or any of the other app-du-jour. That's a start. A lot of the "information" is so low-grade that it isn't worth bothering with. It reminds me of an old joke. Someone commented that the rate at which the library shelf space required to hold scientific journals may soon exceed the speed of light. But it wouldn't violate the theory of relativity because no information was being exchanged.
1. No Facebook
2. No Twitter
3. No LinkedIn
4. No Instagram
5. No Flickr
6. No Slashd.... d'oh!
#DeleteFacebook
I put incoming information into three categories - stuff I need to know, stuff I want to know, and stuff I don't care about at all.
I need to know things like the weather, traffic conditions, family plans, etc.. If a local, national, or international news event will affect me directly, I pay attention and try to find out what exactly is going on. If it's not going to affect me, I ignore it (category #3).
I want to know things like some sports scores, how something works, how to repair something, how to cook with a new recipe - you get the drift. In this category are things I want to know now and some things I can learn about during slack times.
Everything else goes into the "I don't care about it" category. Not surprisingly about 99% of the news goes into this category.
Getting away from the phone can be done with a little willpower. Make it a point to at least put it in airplane mode when you're around friends and family. It's extremely rude to look at your phone when you're talking to somebody - JUST DON'T DO IT. Leave it in the car or in the house when you're going shopping, going to a sporting event, working in the yard, going to the doctor, going to the theater, etc.. What's the worst that could happen? Answer - not much.
If the information wasn't surrounded by so much misinformation and non-information, I might be worried about information overload. As it is, the problem is the time it takes to find enough drops to satiate the thirst.
How Do You Avoid 'Information Overload'
Watch Fox News or CSPAN - no information there.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
As we approach a holiday weekend and a brand new year, do we need to start carving out more time away from the internet?
I don't have any problem with the Internet being full of information, I find it's great. Even if parts of it are full of crackpots you can find tons of useful posts if you're willing to go outside the echo chambers. No, what's killing "everything else" is that there's so much entertainment, even if Sturgeon's law that says 90% of everything is crap I have the feeling the total is growing and growing. Here's a good TV series, there's a good movie, this was a cool game and I feel like I have a "backlog" of things that would be fun but that didn't make the cut. Heck, I have a bunch of things that I'd kinda like to watch a second time which gets constantly pre-empted by something new.
I don't think it's that I've gotten less picky. Maybe it's that I had more time, but that still doesn't explain everything. I feel like things were different before like before WoW etc. where you couldn't get so addicted to a game you'd basically disappear into the computer. Not that I actually played WoW, I knew I had the tendencies from other games and that would be like shooting heroin. But damn, they're good at making things addictive. And this new trend of releasing a whole season at once hasn't helped me, it's like an invitation to binge watching. If I had a week's cool down maybe I'd stop and think it wasn't that great instead of getting caught up in what happens next. And the smartphone killed the remaining zone-out time.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
we're overloaded with data.
There isn't a precise semantic distinction between these two terms, and they're often used interchangeably. That leads to confusing terms like "information overload".
But if you think about information as that aspect of data or its context that makes us informed, and we instead call the phenomenon we're talking about "data overload", then things become a lot clearer. What we're talking about is a form of incapacitation, but this is exactly the opposite of becoming informed, which is a kind of empowerment. The experience of becoming informed is one of surprise; it makes you sit up and feel alert.
So the answer is to be both more selective about information and more broad-minded about it at the same time. Absorbing data which simply reinforces what you already know is mind-numbing. Seek data which puts the data you already have in context, or shows it in a new light. That's what I mean by being more selective (stop mindlessly consuming the same old stuff) and more open-minded (seek out data that challenges your preconceptions and takes you out of your rut).
Also, beware data that is packaged to be easy to consume mindlessly. It's junk food data. You need more intellectual roughage, something that takes time and effort to chew.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
You brought up the shallows in the summary. But the issue isn't that you have information overload, the issue is that you keep surfacing new ideas all the time. Stop what you're doing. Turn off reddit and pick 2 or 3 places for information and check them on a schedule. Not when you're bored, not when you have free time. The problem is that a person gets attuned to the constant 'ding' new thing alert, its the same thing as someone playing slots in vegas. Just choose when it is time to look at things, stick to the schedule and problem solved.
I'm not exactly sure what classifies as "information overload".
I currently have 20,930 unread Slashdot stories stored in my RSS reader (since April 2010). Is this information overload? It is definitely an amount of information that is beyond my processing ability. Yet I don't really feel overloaded.
If I feel like reading news, I open the RSS reader and mash Delete for half a minute on some recent unread articles. After getting rid of the uninteresting clutter, I end up with a list of about 10 stories I'm interested in. Some of them I read right away and some of them I will leave "for tomorrow", usually when the comment section looks too time consuming.
The thing is: I don't panic when the "tomorrow" group does not get any attention for another week or month. It's not going anywhere. I will either get to it eventually, or I'll die first. Either way, problem solved. :)
So for me, the solution is simply "not to care". Just deal with the most important stuff first and leave the rest for tomorrow (or press Delete). I've been fighting procrastination for years but now I kind of realize it can also be a great tool for filtering out all the unnecessary stress.
How to stop drinking? Stop drinking. How to stop drugs? Stop taking them. Information overload? Stop consuming it.
Not reading it is even better. Just blindly hit 'Post'.
Have gnu, will travel.
More Cowbell!
Learn to stop the thinking part of the brain. Constant thinking is like you have a hand that can't stop fiddling around: it's a mental disease. Thoughts keep building a virtual view of the world, and people get to believe they _are_ this thinking process and disconnect from reality, never having the occasion to just experience how they feel, here and now. Words everywhere (radio, ads, TV, on clothes... and now internet) make it more difficult to stop thinking.
You don't need to think that much: just a bit of planning ahead, or for activities like coding. Most other thoughts are just pieces of ideologies running around in your head, trying to grab control of your life.
So practice and get rid of that. "Information overload" is just one of many non-problems solved. Welcome to life!
Oh yeah, almost forgot: Welcome to the planet of the apes!
The complete and total compromise of our society is the problem.
Natural selection is finding a way to operate through the interface of our mechanized microcosm.
The weak are being sucked into the singularity. Their humanity; their reason, their spirituality, their vision, have long since left them and now the devil is coming to collect their debt. There are going to be hordes of brainless media drones no matter what we do now.
Most people reading this are already far down that path, their amygdala programmed by hyperstimulation, overriding all other conscious mental function, spurring them to classically conditioned behavior triggered by artificial symbols.
The question is not what we do to help the fallen. They are already gone.
The question is how do we stop the current leaders of the world from using them to rip civilization to shreds and destroy the freedom of humanity forever.
Aside from that, they are physically destroying the world with poisons and climate change.
If some crisis doesn't happen to wake up the middle class and spur them to take action against the power structure, the fate of the world, the fate of life itself, looks very doubtful.
My karma was manually wiped by site staff https://slashdot.org/~slshdtisctrldbysjws 18 mod up, 10 mod down = bad karma
All I got for Christmas was a relatively nice discussion on Slashdot. Judging by what I've seen recently, it makes me wonder if the professional trolls started their vacations early...
My main reaction is that the editing of the submission to direct it towards information overload has kind of limited the scope of the discussion. Probably a good thing, even though I think the underlying topic is mostly deeper and broader than the important aspect tagged "information overload".
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
The Linux way: I use Duckduckgo in a text web browser (w3m) or something quick like Dillo. DDG doesn't show me a bunch of useless, click-bait info like Google does. Then, if I want to watch YouTube videos (use https://tonvid.com/ as frontend) or any other website with youtube-dl supported embeds (https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/supportedsites.html), I can set w3m's external browser setting to "mpv -ytdl --vo=opengl,drm,caca --ao=pulse,alsa. Using the commas sets a priority order just in case one is not supported. Then, I set w3m's user-agent to mobile Safari. This forces most video and radio sites to switch to mobile friendly, Adobe-free, format like MP4, m3u, etc. If you do open a page and get a JS error, ignore it and press Shift+M to launch mpv anyway; youtube-dl will parse the URL for you. Using mpv as my player, I can stream videos to my computer in both GUI and TTY as long as I'm runlevel 3 or 5 and have keyboard controls, which vlc-nox does not in TTY. It's basically an easier to use fork of mplayer. Made a tutorial here: https://www.bitchute.com/video.... No ads, no JS tracking, and lightning speed. And yes, that also means getting your p0rñ fix without lea in the command-line. ;)
TL DR;
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I find the very concept of "information overload" kind of silly since we are all in complete control of the amount and type of information we consume.
The underlying problem is really just that you consume too much information that triggers your anger response. As Bob Newhart would say "Stop It".
Just stop reading so much. Or maybe read more about things that bring you joy. Too many people are feeling alienated because they consume a mental diet tailor-made by crack teams to make you feel afraid and angry and alone.
Stop It.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I just stopped worrying about compl
Table-ized A.I.
I felt significantly better after ditching Facebook and Twitter. It took me a little while to stop craving the need to use social media but it feels good to be without it. As a sort of funny side effect, my smartphone has better battery life without those apps installed.
I don't read newspapers or watch network news. A radio newstalk host said once that there are only 3 (political) news stories. I stopped listening to the media for six months and found, after a quick review, that there really are only 3 stories when I listened again. I stopped listening for 99% of the stories. That saves a lot of time when one doesn't have to listen to all the individual stories. I don't watch USA network television. Streaming lets me watch what I want to watch and without commercials. In IT, the ideas are constantly repackaged. Same ideas just new wrappers -- it's either centralized or distributed: mainframes or workstations, client/server, cloud computing. This happens with other IT services and other industries. Lots and lots of back and forth between a limited number of options. The biggest help is growing older. Young people like drama and management uses drama to corral their younger work forces.
Information overload? Stop consuming it.
WOW -- I find your ideas intriguing and would like to subscribe to your email newsletter.
It'll fit right in with the rest of the stuff I never quite get around to actually read.
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
How do you avoid information overload?
Make space in your life.
1. Stop reading the news. It's amazing how (1) information isn't really all that important, nor informative and (2) you tend to get to know important information by IRL socialising.
2. Deactivate your Facebook. Or at least, remove the bloody app from your phone and stop checking it every damn day.
3. Socialise with real people, in real life. Have meaningful conversations.
But if I did, it'd take the form of a 'distributed intelligence agency' of devices and people that observed me, observed my interactions with the world, engaged me in conversation (and other devices and humans on my behalf), and then acted based on its perception of my need. Such actions would include filtering or augmenting my information flows (preferably, doing both). But of course, such a system would need to be controlled, and answerable, to me the user.
This is such a natural role for operating system vendors, its a wonder that Apple, Microsoft, Google, Fitbit, Amazon, Redhat, Omron, Arduino, KDE, etc, haven't cottoned onto it yet. Perhaps because building a 'society of intelligent agents' that acts in the best interests of the customer requires cooperating with 'the other'. And that is hard - both financially, and technically.
When that day comes around, my medical records, Fitbit history, readings from my home blood pressure monitor, locations from my mobile, credit card history -- all these would be brought together and 'digested'. I'd then be 'counselled' to eat healthy takeaway from WholeFoods, bypassing the PizzaHut I was walking towards. (Or not, as the case may be - I've had a stellar exercise week).
Unfortunately, commercial OS vendors and data providers are busy building or tending the walled gardens of their rent-seeking dreams. So the API hooks this 'Society of the Mind' intelligence agency requires aren't available. Until that comes to pass, we're stuck entering data into our own life.
social networks:
No social networks. I have one spoof account on FB for my social dancing contacts which I use as needed. Can go for weeks without looking at it. My other social network account has my real portrait and name and is basically there to lead people to my professional Homepage (I do websoftware development).
Email:
I get roughly 5 meaningful emails a week (that includes work), the rest is mostly newsletter spam which I filter or unsubscribe. I seriously cannot fathom what these poor sobs getting 200 emails a day handle it.
Web:
I read and write a little Slashdot every day, and skim German newspapers and newsmags. Although I've reduced that lately - to much cheaply produced read & enrage bait even in respectable outlets (they are *all* struggling to compete). I watch John Oliver, Jim Sterling, and the occasional TED talk. Tim Ferriss (tim.blog) roughly once a month.
Professional:
Techcrunch roughly once a week, Chromedev channel on YouTube roughly once a month.
My biggest struggle is trying not to get caught up in to many web technology fads, which I don't always manage. With full stack webdev you never stop learning so there is more than enough information for me to take in anyways.
Books: roughly 1 every two months right now. To little. I read American scientific stuff (poor economics, why Nations fail, etc.) and some sci-fi and cyberpunk fiction.
Recently I've picked up the habit of breaking off reading if I find I have more important/rewarding things to do, like yoga, dancing or planning my next trip.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I limit my exposure, and force time restrictions on my own browsing. I will only allow myself to browse certain set times and when I feel I need to look some information up, I take note and either wait for that time or consider alternatives.
Twinstiq, game news
Just don't look, just don't look.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
That's cute...You think people use the space between their ears for something other than keeping their heads three dimensional. If you killed every intelligent being on this planet, the population MIGHT drop by...twelve?
This may not be true of Slashdot readers, but I think the majority of Americans spend a huge percentage of their non-working, non-sleeping time tapped into some kind of entertainment. TV shows, Netflix, sports, music-as-background, smartphone and console games; the list goes on and on. All of these interfere with critical thinking. In the U.S., doing critical thinking brands you as an "intellectual", and we've always been anti-intellectual in this country. What other country in their history has had a political party called the "Know Nothings"? I think for the most part we've inoculated ourselves against Information Overload just by not paying attention.
... and avoid the rest.
Information not related to your interests is not only uninteresting, it's a waste of time.
You can be even more informed about your core passions by tamping down on the noise.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Seriously. Hike. Bike. Paddle a Kayak. Snowboard. Camp. Get on an elliptic trainer and stare at the girls in yoga pants at the gym. It's hard maybe to start doing it, but once you find something that you like, it will be hard to stay away from that thing. My biggest addiction is whitewater kayaking. Playboats. Class IV-V creeking. Waterfalls, whatever! You can't really be distracted by facespace drama and world politics when you're in the gnar!
The thing that really rocks about individual sports like snowboards, mountainbikes, and kayaks is that there is always a progression and you look forward to working hard to get to that next level.
I do it by skipping fluff stories such as this thing. Unless of course, I have something snarky and not constructive to add.
Huh, this highly recycled hummingbird feather got moderated as insightful.
My mission here will be complete and I can die happy if only I can now figure out how to moderate a moderation point as +1 QED.
The whole idea of filter failure reminds me of what is happening in people with autism/aspergers and also supposedly wild animals. The human brain has been designed to filter out the unimportant and focus on the important. It's the reason that most non-autistic people after a short amount of time will stop noticing a ticking clock in the background. I think the problem with technology today is just like we have figured out how to synthesize stuff like sugar and drugs that directly bypass the brain's controls, we are doing the same with media. We are basically overloading our brains with tons of stimulus that our primitive brains can't filter properly into important and not important. In a small community, knowing that there is a murderer out killing people is likely very important knowledge. Knowing that some crazy killed someone halfway around the world is probably not important to your overall health but your brain doesn't know that. Even though your higher level conscience can usually differentiate between what is real and what is not real, it's not 100%. Your heartrate still increases while watching a horror movie because at some level your brain still thinks its real. Add to that that companies actually go out of their way to make their products more addicting and you have a disaster on your hand.