Lark Birdsong's List: Information Overload

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"President Obama has been taking some heat in techie circles over comments he made at a commencement address over the weekend about iPods and iPads and other digital distractions. Because of these things, he said, "information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation." To his critics, it made him sound, well, like a Luddite, not the cool, tech-friendly, BlackBerry-carrying president they thought he was.\nSUBSCRIBE Click Here to subscribe to NEWSWEEK and save up to 88% >>\n\nI hate to say this, but he's right. In fact I'd expand his list of distractions to include Web sites like Facebook and Twitter. And I'd go further on the notion of emancipation and say that in many ways our digital tools serve only to enslave us. This may sound like heresy coming from a technology editor but hear me out."

"Can everyone just stop whining about information overload? I mean, in the knowledge economy, information is our most valuable commodity.\n\nAnd these days it's available in almost infinite abundance, delivered automatically to our electronic devices or accessible with a few mouse clicks. So buck up, already!\n\nWait a second: CanI just stop whining about information overload?\n\nThe flood of information that swamps me daily seems to produce more pain than gain. And it's not just the incoming tidal wave of e-mail messages and RSS feeds that causes me grief. It's also the vast ocean of information I feel compelled to go out and explore in order to keep up in my job."

"Firehose of instant content\n\nMaking the real-time Web relevant, Tom Krazit, Relevant Results (Apr 5)\n\n"Instant content" - that's a good phrase - so is "signal to noise ratio" - both belong to real-time search - the term usually used for looking at the fire-hose of postings from social media - another new term to represent all those places where people announce, jot down, opine and chatter.\n\nAnd, it seems, it's all part of a trend to an explosion of content on the web - one that does show sentiment and maybe signficance - and one where there may be new agreements (or monopolies) for accessing that content."

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"The average person today consumes almost three times as much information as what the typical person consumed in 1960, according to research at the University of California, San Diego.

And The New York Times reports that the average computer user checks 40 websites a day and can switch programs 36 times an hour."

"When I work with people in my business productivity practice, the first question I ask them is, "What's stopping you from being more productive?" The answers that keep coming up are pretty much the same from everyone. "

"Feeling overwhelmed by too much information? What else is new? The amount of digital data available on the Web every day reaches records of mind-boggling proportions—now more than a zettabyte (1021 bytes) and presumably accumulating at an ever-increasing rate, estimated at 30-percent growth per year from 1999 to 2002.

But such figures—often presented as evidence of unprecedented and stress-inducing overload—don't mean much. After all, it takes only one or two pages of Google hits to overwhelm the average reader. Does it really matter whether there are hundreds or thousands more pages after those?

More important, information overload was experienced long before the appearance of today's digital gadgets. Complaints about "too many books" echo across the centuries, from when books were papyrus rolls, parchment manuscripts, or hand printed. The complaint is also common in other cultural traditions, like the Chinese, built on textual accumulation around a canon of classics."

"The rise of social media has led to an exponential proliferation of content online and widespread demand for tools to filter that information. Popularity and relevance are the most common metrics through which to filter that content - but are they the best?

We asked three people building cutting-edge social software what they think the relationship between relevance, popularity and filtering is going to be in the future. They offered three very different responses. What do you think the future of information filtering will look like? "

"Glushko, a professor at University of California Berkeley’s School of Information, wrote (or at least edited) the book on the organization of things. “The Discipline of Organizing,” published last month by MIT Press, is a textbook for those who store and inventory things for a living, including librarians, computer scientists, and museum curators. But while the book itself is considerably more abstruse than civilians require, Glushko insists that its lessons apply to pretty much every professional under the sun: homicide detectives, convenience store managers, zookeepers, candlestick makers."

"With its theme, "Our Information, Always and Forever," Part I of this book covers the basics of personal information management (PIM) including six essential activities of PIM and six (different) ways in which information can be personal to us. Part I then goes on to explore key issues that arise in the "great migration" of our information onto the Web and into a myriad of mobile devices.

Part 2 provides a more focused look at technologies for managing information that promise to profoundly alter our practices of PIM and, through these practices, the way we lead our lives."