I think our skill to process information has natural limits, which were overwhelmed decades ago by the social media firehose and a breakdown of information-filtering infrastructure.
an average edition of a newspaper the size of The Times already contains more information about the world than a person in the 17th Century was likely to come across in a lifetime. (Wurman, Information Anxiety)
That was back in 1989. We’re now 30 years later with an internet supercharged by predatory algorithms.
And we can’t filter all of it without either completely withdrawing from the world entirely or spending months learning why and how to filter it ourselves.
We have had information overload in some form or another since the 1500s. What is changing now is the filters we use for the most of the 1500 period are breaking, and designing new filters doesn’t mean simply updating the old filters. They have broken for structural reasons, not for service reasons. (Shirky, It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure)
Perhaps, but I’m talking about are problems within human limits. For example, take information from 5 different sources to synthesize an answer to a question.
I think our skill to process information has natural limits, which were overwhelmed decades ago by the social media firehose and a breakdown of information-filtering infrastructure.
That was back in 1989. We’re now 30 years later with an internet supercharged by predatory algorithms.
And we can’t filter all of it without either completely withdrawing from the world entirely or spending months learning why and how to filter it ourselves.
Perhaps, but I’m talking about are problems within human limits. For example, take information from 5 different sources to synthesize an answer to a question.