NEW YORK -- Web 2.0 Expo -- With the introduction of social media tools, and our abundance of blogs, vlogs, and clogs galore, Web users often find themselves struggling to remain productive in what's been called the "information overload" culture. But in a keynote session here today, Clay Shirkey, author of Here Comes Everybody, said that so-called overload is actually little more than "filter failure."
"What we're dealing with now isn't information overload -- because we're always dealing with information overload," says Shirkey, who says information overload has been an issue since the introduction of the printing press. "[The Internet] introduced, for the first time, post-Gutenberg economics. The cost of producing anything by anyone has fallen through the floor, famously. And as a result, there's no logic you have to filter for quality."
Instead of blaming the abundance of information available in the connected age, he says, it's consumers' duty to continue to evolve with the systems -- and to reconfigure their information filters, both culturally and technologically.
Facebook is one service that takes a lot of heat for creating information overload, opening up users to a wealth of information and "news" never before available nor solicited.
And many users have found out the hard way that Facebook often serves as a path to unwittingly handing over information to more than just an intended set of recipients.
Shirkey cited an example of a friend who, in breaking off her engagement, ended up accidentally alerting all her Facebook friends and those of her ex-fiance's about her newfound "Singlehood" -- despite the fact she thought she took proper measures with her privacy settings. Shirkey says neither his friend nor Facebook are to blame for such a self-inflicted leak. Rather, the trouble is that managing privacy in the way most people are asked to do today is an "unnatural act," and few are accustomed to it.
"We're not moving from one engineered system to another," he says. "We're moving from one evolved system to another."
As the shift is both technological and cultural, it will require that consumers develop and evolve accordingly. "Designing new filters doesn't mean redesigning old filters," says Shirkey. "They're broken for structural reasons, not surface reasons. In some instances it'll be a simple matter of programming... Some of it is actually going to be around rethinking social norms."
In that sense, users will need to break down today's alleged information overload bit by bit and rethink how they absorb information, at each level. (You might even think of it as If You Can't Beat 'Em, Join 'Em 2.0.)
"When you feel yourself getting too much information, it's not to say to yourself 'What's happened to the information?' It's to say, 'What filter just broke?' " he says. "When you start asking that question, we're going to get some clue as to where to put the design effort."
In my job as a CIO, I've been working on tackling information overload with mixed results. My company, a professional services firm, suffers more than most because of a couple of infrastructure problems that arose from a couple of mergers.
I've been trying to get my colleagues to acknowledge that attacking our information overload problem will improve our overall knowledge sharing collaboration efforts and also contribute to our bottom line. But some people here just don't understand the extent of the problem.
I just read about information overload awarenesss day and I've signed up our company as a participant and designated site - I hope this will get my point across to my colleagues and help them understand what we can do to improve our overall position relative to information overload. For others in my position (and I'm sure there are many of you) I encourage you to do the same, Information is available at www.informationoverloadday.com
I have often found myself in information overload, but entirely of my own doing. Without realizing it, I sign up for this or that newsletter or forum update. Because of this, I now utilize a self imposed filter day where I declutter my world. As soon as I feel overwhelmed with email, I begin reducing my subscriptions to alerts and emails I actually read. This has done wonders for both my information intake and my overall productivity.
So who's to blame? there has to be someone! right?
The problem with the filters we have now is that they are not autoprogrammable. We need to spend time setting it, and that can take a lot of time, depending on how nitty-picky you want to be.
Reading your post, it suddenly striked me- how deeply our society has changed. Chaging the Facebook status may seriously influence the actions of so many people- that is just amazing.
Speaking about the information overload and filters.You know, the brain of the most of the people " is working" only for 3%. The brain of the peole who are involved in active intelectual activity (That is a hint about us:) is working for the 5-7%.So 93% of our brains are ready to be overloaded with information but the working part doesn't let it.So we filter everything we need.And if the person reacts to some information- like when someone gets an information about personal status- it is because our mind considers that information significant .We can pay attention and act or we can easily skip that fact and react to the changing of religion status...So we filter what the filters filter:)
In the existing paradigms, there will always be impasses to filters’ efficiency, because it will never be inclusive of all the user’s interests, both in filtering the abundance of incoming information and in choosing what filter to activate for outbound interactions in the surplus of a person's social spheres.
The prism to be taken is that of context. The context of a specific social interaction for outbound filters, or the personal relevance as a filter for inbound information.
However, the key lies in taking a holistic approach of contexting people and not the content they interact with. It is a paradigm shift that puts me, the user, at the center, and turns filtering from a “push” situation, into a “pull” situation based on personal context. Once this holistic approach of an inclusive person’s context becomes the prismatic angle through which s/he interacts with the digital world, the overwhelming overpour of web interactions is turned into a humanizing experience.
More on that in the blog post:
Contexting people – mitigating the information-overload / attention-management crisis. www.I4c-corp.com
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