Having Too Much Information Can Narrow Your Focus 144
CeruleanDragon writes
"This excerpt sums up Dave Pell's article at NPR pretty well: 'Google's Eric Schmidt recently stated that every two days we create as much information as we did from the beginning of civilization through 2003. Perhaps the sheer bulk of data makes it easier to suppress that information which we find overly unpleasant. Who has got time for a victim in Afghanistan or end-of-life issues with all these tweets coming in?' It's a valid point. If it's not tweets or Facebook posts, it's lengthy forum arguments or reading news articles from the time you walk in the door at work until you're ready for bed at night, and realizing you didn't actually accomplish anything else. Sometimes too much information can get in the way of living and can bury otherwise important things."
realizing you didn't actually accomplish anything (Score:3, Insightful)
sounds like a day in the life of average slashdotter. honestly this is too many days of my life lately. I think I'll go write some code.
TV? (Score:5, Insightful)
If it's not Tweets or Facebook posts, it's lengthy forum arguments or reading news articles from the time you walk in the door at work until you're ready for bed at night, and realizing you didn't actually accomplish anything else
RIght, because before the information explosion on the internet, people never watched TV from the time they walked in the door until they were ready for bed at night, accomplishing nothing. The newest shiny toy is always a distraction, if you aren't going to learn to overcome being distracted, there will always be a new thing to ruin your productivity.
And if you disagree with me, by golly, I'll stay here and argue with you until the sun goes down if I have to!
On the other hand (Score:5, Insightful)
Bull. (Score:5, Insightful)
The bulk of information created before the advent of the Printing Press has been lost. We only have fragments of data from the Roman Republic and Western Empire. Same goes for a host of empires and states.
We create more bytes of data and more copies of data while we track things much closer, we really don't know what was created before. We don't know all the works of art, mundane information and data saved by the Romans, Greeks, Han, Aztecs, Maya, Egyptians or Celts, or any of the thousands of other civilizations.
Herbert Simon (Score:4, Insightful)
-- Herbert Simon (1916 - 2001) [wikipedia.org]
Cynically Translated (Score:1, Insightful)
You don't care sufficiently about issues I care about, and I believe popular social media is the culprit!
People saw this coming (Score:1, Insightful)
Loads of useless information (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:TV? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I used to collect money... (Score:2, Insightful)
information makes you smarter and less likely to be a good slave to the spiritual barenness that is western materialism.
Priorities (Score:3, Insightful)
What a shame. Shouldn't it be the other way around? Tweets are twaddle.
Perhaps we're all easily distracted - or need to be distracted. Perhaps wars half a world away or end-of-life issues are too sad, distant or abstract, to be a priority for thought, but they are there and they are real.
As I've mentioned before: I know the world simply disappeared for me when my wife was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer in November 2005. All I could see and hear was her for the next seven weeks until she died in my arms. Twenty years together and a simple headache changed the course of two lives forever. Now I have trouble seeing or hearing anything. The future is gone and my star shines no more.
Re:Bull. (Score:5, Insightful)
What is more accurate is to say that "we're archiving more useless data now than we ever used to before".
wrong metric (Score:3, Insightful)
We RECORD more information. Information has been produced in rough proportion to the population at pretty much the same rate as ever.
To be fair... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Bull. (Score:2, Insightful)
You're on /., so let's make a quick calculation...
0 * 1.005 = 0
Not "looking good" to me.
Re:every so often, you have to turn off the toys. (Score:2, Insightful)
My grandparents got a color TV before my family did. We'd go to their house and glom onto to the set. My grandparents sighed. Then they told my dad to buy any color TV he wanted and they would pay for it. We weren't so dazzled at the grandparents house anymore, so they got to spend time with their grandchildren. They could have just ruled no TV watching at their house. My grandparents were clever, compassionate people.
Technology, like people, become socialized as they mature, but we're the one's who adapt. Which is to say we become accustomed to its qualities and uses. Books are a socialized technology - we "know" them very well. We knew scrolls before that. We knew how to enter content, consume content, and archive content. We knew how to delete content. This helped shape what we considered "knowledge" and the socio-political power of harnessing control of it.
We'll learn how and when to use this and future technologies, but we do need to wear ourselves out before then. Like a much-desired birthday present that becomes part of your life six months later.
I'm not a Coward - I just don't know if I'll post here again, so why bother to create an account. Call me @Maggid
Having too much DATA can distract you from info (Score:4, Insightful)
We do not create much information each day. Information is actually useful stuff.
What we create tons of each day is useless data and distractions from reality.
Tons of BS and actual anti-information (lies and errors).
Tons of anti-data.
Tons of anti-reality.
Like for instance the title of this thread...
or most anything else on slashdot...
Having Too Much Information Can Narrow Your Focus (Score:3, Insightful)
So basically, we should stop reading slashdot? (Score:4, Insightful)
He has a valid point. More information != better informed. I could spend all day following celeb drivel and not know what days it is.
BUT I object to the "caring about some victim in Pakistan". I can be very well informed, and still not give a shit. Why does being informed having to mean I should care? There are plenty of rich muslim nations, let them donate some for a change. They wanted their own Red Cross, let it take care of their own. You see, being well informed means knowing that the Red Moon isn't all that well organized and Muslim nations that insisted it be created are very poor donors (pledges mean nothing, money actually paid out counts).
So, if Iran doesn't care, why should I?
Being well informed I also know that any money I donate personally in such a country will not reach the people I intend it to go to. An uninformed person might think ten bucks goes to feed a starving family. An informed person knows it goes to some tribal chiefs new car.
It is tricky isn't it? An uninformed person doesn't have a bleeding heart because they don't know about it. An informed person heart isn't bleeding because he knows the background.
Perhaps what the article writer wants is to have people informed JUST enough so they agree with his vision of the world. After all, someone who thinks exactly like me must be very well informed and highly intelligent. If a person who thinks exactly like me was a blittering idiot... well that just isn't possible. I might be thought to be a blittering idiot and clearly I am not!
Just what is living a life. What is an accomplishment? If a person enjoys twittering, then isn't that living the life he wants to life? Some say an achievement is to go forth and reproduce. If you haven't got a dozen kids or more, you are failing. But because someone else thinks that, does that mean everyone should think that.
Life is futile. No matter what you do, you die and the way our society works we need more passive people then revolutionaries. If everyone made a difference in the world, we would never get done reading the newspaper.
99% of people life in their own small part of the world, barely touching the rest of it. They collect matchboxes or know every soccer match ever played and then they die and it is gone. They mattered in their own little world but in the global scheme of things? Not so much. That is life. Learn to accept it or run for president... and what will Clinton and Bush be known for? Getting bush in and global war. I think someone scoring 1000 tweets is a lot less harmful.
Search (Score:3, Insightful)
One problem is that "information" is largely supposed to make things easier by giving you access to something that was already done: someone else already went out there and collected meticulous information on frog populations, so it's easier to get access to that information than go out and count frogs yourself. But as information multiplies, sometimes it really is easier to just count the damn frogs instead of making sense of the voluminous and often inconsistent frog literature. Diderot noticed this in 1755, in a famous passage:
"As long as the centuries continue to unfold, the number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed in nature as it will be to find it hidden away in an immense multitude of bound volumes."
I disagree. What we actually find is that paragons are held up and improved upon and our search skills have exceeded what Diderot expected. Diderot foresaw in a library of a billion books that if you wanted to know how tall the local mountain was, it may actually be faster to simply go to the local mountain and plot it's height than to actually wade through all those books for the precise piece of information.
However, in reality, it didn't end up like that at all. We type "What is the height of Blue Mountain [wikipedia.org]?" in Google and the first link spits out "2320 feet." It isn't faster at all to go examine nature for myself. If anything in spite of increased information our speed of going through books has been amplified to an even greater degree.
And as for frogs. There probably are paragon studies of them, best-done studies. There are also probably studies where people spent 20 years studying local frog populations and things do time-consuming and in depth that it would take a whole life to replicate, but which can be called up on a whim in seconds.
Diderot was really, really wrong.
Bus accidents (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Also true in technology (Score:1, Insightful)
when you find out the missing piece you are supposed to put up a HOWTO, or leave a comment, edit the wiki, etc. That's how it works.
Excuse the world for not presenting you with the exact information you were looking for in the precise format you needed.