Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Rethinking Information Overload

"America has, in fact, transformed journalism from what it once was, the periodical expression of the thought of the time, the opportune record of the questions and answers of contemporary life, into an agency for collecting, condensing and assimilating the trivialities of the entire human existence, [...] the frantic haste with which we bolt everything we take, seconded by the eager wish of the journalist not to be a day behind his competitor, abolishes deliberation from judgment and sound digestion from our mental constitutions. We have no time to go below surfaces, and, as a general thing, no disposition."

Yesterday's George Will column? Guess again. The year is 1891 and journalist W. J. Stillman is complaining about the telegraph and the death of "real" news!

I have been interested in the process of managing information overload for some time now. The most interesting recent thoughts I have seen come out about how to deal with this fundamental (and apparently long-term) problem come from NYU professor and tech guru Clay Shirky. I have pointed to Shirky's work before but, if you have not seen Shirky's recent speech at the Web 2.0 Expo and you are at all concerned with the issue of information overload, you owe it to yourself to do whatever you have to do to see this video. Shirky's a good speaker and the insight he provides into this problem is brilliant:



Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

No comments:

 
http://sourcesandmethods.blogspot.com/2010/02/rethinking-information-overload.html
sourcesandmethods.blogspot.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2017-34
179709
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:YLTS5SUIJXZXOVWBUWHI5RFJBHISI5Y3
<urn:uuid:1ba66c17-d38b-41b8-90b6-9d9629fc96dd>
2017-08-21T15:40:52Z
172.217.3.33
application/xhtml+xml
sha1:2PT2WEO6RMD7CI26XO67SKBCID7G3ER7
<urn:uuid:03852f70-f5e9-4d22-a0d2-dcba28de4b73>
http://sourcesandmethods.blogspot.com/2010/02/rethinking-information-overload.html
response
<urn:uuid:b97ff1dd-a041-4c0d-92a0-ae67de6bf28b>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-145-168-196.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-34
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for August 2017
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf