In this age of social media, we create informational flows of near unrestrained magnitude from countless sources. In effect, the sheer amount of information threatens to hide really valuable information.
How often do you feel like the student in Gary Larson’s Far Side cartoon, and are tempted to say, “Please, sir, may I please be excused? My head is full.”
A disk device can become so overwhelmed with Input – Output requests and at one point, it will flash some warning messages asking you to increase your storage, or defragment it, or delete unneeded files. But what can we do when our brains are overwhelmed with information?
In this age of social media, we create informational flows of near unrestrained magnitude from countless sources. In effect, the sheer amount of information threatens to hide really valuable information.
The traditional process of ‘filter-then-publish‘– done by professional editors - has been inverted to ‘publish-then-filter‘. So now instead of relying on professional editors and librarians to make recommendations, we have to become experts ourselves.
The curious thing about this state is that seemingly accidental recommendations from many sources often result in remarkably high quality ideas – see crowdsourcing by Jeff Howe. The challenge here is seeing how quickly we can discover them in the atomized universe; this is quite time consuming, which often leads to our brain overload.
In parallel to the free-for-all publishing world, we also see new trends for creating collaborative methods for producing both aggregated and authoritative content that takes advantage of the limitless Web sources and yet can be trusted. Examples of such trends are Wikipedia, wikis and most recently Knols. This community approach, with a peer review process, for sharing knowledge and learning, manifests our need for creating dependable and trustworthy information sources.
It seems that the genius of connectedness offers us too many tempting directions; from time to time, we need to reach for some authoritative content to keep us on dry land and save us from drowning in information overload.