Structure in the flow

Via a LifeHacker story, I found this video of NYU New Media professor Clay Shirky’s opinion on the information overload problem. It’s very interesting, if a bit long, so I made a summary of some of his points:

• We always hear the same story: information being produced increasingly fast. That makes us feel good about ourselves: that’s why I can’t get anything done, see!

IDC information overload chart (mentioned in Shirky’s talk)

• In the past, the editor had to filter for quality what went out of the printing press, due to the risk involved if the book didn’t sell. But the Internet introduced “post-Gutenberg economics”, where the filter for quality is now “way downstream” from the source, since everyone may publish.
• So we shouldn’t see the problem as an information overproduction at the source problem, so much as a personal filtering problem.
• He takes email spam as an example: we set up filters, but after a few time we notice more spam gets in anyway: our filters need tweaking. It’s about old filters continuously breaking and needing to be fixed.
• Social media and the Internet in general bring new systems that break old ways of exchanging information, and makes us formalize and need to take responsibility for information flow issues, who our information might reach, how public it gets, like privacy of Facebook events.
• Conclusion: information overload is not just a superficial problem, something that can be solved by programming once and for all. Algorithms can help, yes, but we need to rethink social norms and when we face overload, ask ourself personally: which of my filters just broke?

As some people underlined in comments at LifeHacker, “solving” information overload is nothing new for another fundamental reason: it’s about chosing what we’re personally interested in. One cannot master every field there is, obviously. In the end, it’s about personal choice, not just about what’s universally “good” or “bad”. That’s one problem with social bookmarking: one story might be very interesting to you and not to the mass, not even to people in what you consider your own field.