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."
sort of like Huxley's distopia (Score:5, Interesting)
A walk through the forest is informationally rich. (Score:3, Interesting)
When you walk on the beach your interpret the sound waves of information as noise because you're unable to comprehend any deeper meaning than the existence of waves crashing nearby.
finding/processing the information isn't free (Score:5, Interesting)
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:
Re:Bull. (Score:5, Interesting)
You know, that makes me wonder how much of all this data that we're assuming is going to create a "permanent" archive is really going to be permanent.
I remember hearing about this kind of information overload back in the days when we backed up data on 200MB magnetic tapes. Those tapes got stacked in closets, pile upon pile, and nobody's ever going to look at most of them ever again.
I wonder if in 250 years people are going to say the same thing about our culture that you said about the pre-printing press days. A lot of books were printed that are gone forever. Magnetic coatings on mylar tape have flaked off. I've got a drawer full of old external drives. I'd bet that in 10 years if I were to plug one in, assuming there were still USB ports on computers then, that at least one of those drives is going to fail.
I'm not saying digital information isn't more persistent than print on vellum or impressions on clay cylinders, but at some point somebody has to care about that information if it's really going to be available to future generations. Look how many films from as late as the 1970s have already deteriorated and are lost. I just heard someone talking about the archives of the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Apparently, John Lennon and Paul McCartney were on together once in the early 60's. But because some production manager decided that tape was too expensive not to re-use, there are no copies left to see except about 2 minutes of 8mm film someone shot off of his TV set (at a different frame rate, too).
Even when you have a "permanent" record, at least today, it's not really permanent unless someone cares enough to maintain it.
most facts are unimportant (Score:1, Interesting)
"... Sometimes too much information can get in the way of living and can bury otherwise important things."
Too much information always gets in the way. Napoleon Hill was the original mass-market "motivational speaker". He dedicated his life to teaching a science of success. One of the key aspects of Hill's philosophy is to focus on one's "definite major purpose" in life. What are you doing with your life? Some people are artists, others look to promote public health, others are builders or teachers.There are as many purposes as there are people.
This excerpt comes from Napoleon Hill's 9-cd package, "Your Right To Be Rich".
I've cut down on the amount of crap I read online since I heard this little bit a month ago.... I kind of keep current, but I don't care about minutiae like I used to, and when I catch myself reading about something that doesn't matter for me, I either start practicing my speedreading, or just close the tab.
Attention (Score:3, Interesting)
I was listening to an interview on NPR while in my car. The point made was that most human beings have to work to pay attention, and can be easily distracted. It does not come naturally. As an example they explained that listening to the radio while driving made you a poorer driver. This is because most people's brains are incapable of processing that much information at one time. Just as this was said I started hearing car horns behind me. I had switched my attention from driving to the radio interview about paying attention while driving. I had stopped at a green light.
I believe that most of us have a physiological limit of how much sensory input we can process at once, and how fast we can switch our full attention from one task to the next. The distractions I have right now: the blackberry dinging, the "new mail" flag popping up, the "bell on screen 1" messages, gathering status of several simultaneous running jobs, and writing this post. Something has to be tuned out or lots of work is completed with little progress. I often use music (without lyrics) to drown out distractions, simplify the amount of messages going to my brain, allowing me to pay attention to one task at a time. I usually do this when the "background noise level" is so severe I finally recognize what is happening.
This is why I love /. Summaries for the weak minded and highly-distracted, like me!
Data Information (Score:3, Interesting)
Or is that Information Data?
Whichever, Schmidt has it wrong.
We're producing reams of data. Its information content is probably log(log(O)) as great as its data content, since log(O) is pretty much how information and data relate in the first place, and we're keeping what seems like exponentially more data than we would have thought to save in the pre-nearly-free-storage days.
Global Warming (Score:2, Interesting)
So this explains why the Global Warming groups hide their data/programs.
Re:Bull. (Score:3, Interesting)
There was alot of tape destruction and data loss in early TV, like pretty much the entire DuMont network, a ton of black and white stuff from the 40s, 50s and 60s.
Sure I create a ton of data during a day, but alot of those numbers are artificially high, I go out and google search and get hits back, all those google logo, ads on the side, those go millions of times a day, so is that "information" created each time it's uploaded and then downloaded?
So would information created in 1500 include the audio information of a town cryer? And how do we measure that bandwidth?
Saying things like "we create more information every hour than the Roman Empire did during the entire reign of Augustus" is kind of nonsense on a number of levels. /. in 2300
More p0rn is created every nano-second than was ever downloaded from 2000-2010.
Re:Herbert Simon (Score:2, Interesting)
We are selling our attention whenever we're on the clock.
When we're recreating, it's different: Capitalists, having made a big enough bunch of us look at some shiny content they own, then sell other Capitalists the right to divert our attention with their ads.
Good, well-placed ads distract people and keep them on task long enough to spend their money.
Re:TV? (Score:5, Interesting)
There's another thing that makes me go "duh", even more than the TV argument.
Books.
I recently had a discussion with a friend who was amazed that these days, there was so little censoring in the 100+ page media. He wondered if our governments (or corporations as he now calls them) were getting sensible.
I've always been amazed at this train of thought. Books don't require censoring anymore. There are so many books coming out, every single day, that it would be impossible for the public at large to have a "big thought" pierce through the cloud of utter bollocks that is being printed. Books had a very big potential for spreading ideas around the world; or at least countries.
Everyone can get a book published and printed. Heck, I have two books in print, and three which are currently being "worked on" -- and I went the old way, with a publishing house taking me under their wing, and I have some semi-monk semi-guru who tries to inspire me on a weekly basis.
Today, you'd be hard pushed to find anything remotely interesting or exposing novel ideas. It seems to me that as a whole, the amount of information is only a repercussion of a more general trend: people don't give a shit. After having to deal with mortgage, picking up the kids and dealing with an ego-driven sadistic boss, people don't want to care, they don't want to think.
Does this mean that there has been a shift in the way people think, or the fact they want to unwind? No, not at all.
The only real difference, is that now, through the limited costs of publishing things around the world, the crap you used to hear at the local pub now comes right into your inbox, or some idiot in Vermont has enough free time to actually write a whole book around it.
The dynamics haven't changed one bit. Only how the media presents itself, and how the crap flows down the drain.
Re:That's why I bought a boat (Score:3, Interesting)
A boat being a hole in the water that you pour money into.
For those of us who can't afford such things, we are in the process of discovering that finding information is no longer the valuable skill that it used to be; now the skills are in demand are in filtering the info to get to what is useful. And that seems to mostly be a matter of anti-informing: deliberately choosing to be ignorant about things that just don't matter.
Of course there is the problem of determining what does matter. But that was probably always the case.
Re:TV? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's worse now because we have some degree of control over it. When I was a kid and we only had a couple channels, that wasn't a problem, we could flip channels or turn it off, that was about it. These days though, we've got a ridiculous number of sources available and it's far more than the take it or leave it that we used to have. We can't really default to a whatever's on approach and end up with anything other than static.