Too Much Information
Feb. 26th, 2007 12:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
forsythThere is a line in one of the Mage books in the third edition before White Wolf blew up their world that I got reminded of today. It was about the Virtual Adepts, and it was about the change in attitude between the second and third editions. I couldn't find it leafing through the main book or the VA clanbook, but I remember the gist of it.
It was something like this. In the old version, the ethos was the hacker slogan "Information wants to be free!" so thematically, they grabbed whatever they could and threw it out there. But in the newer edition, the focus changed, because it wasn't working. Information might want to be free, but throwing everything out there was just dumping out a mess, with nothing to separate the important from the unimportant. Too much information doesn't mean more stuff happens, it slows stuff down since people have to go through all the information to find what they need.
And this seemed relevant today, since I was catching up on what had happened on the Internet since I hadn't been on much for a couple days, and because of the linkdump post I made with several things I had wanted to write more about but hadn't gotten to. A couple of them I still plan to write something about, really. But there were so many things I was finding that I wanted to say something about, I just kept finding new ones and throwing the old ones on a pile of bookmarks. It's the same kind of thing as the story bit above. And I'm hardly the first person to have that happen, there's plenty of wonks and self-help gurus who are trying to turn "information overload" into one of those breathless reports on the local evening news. "And coming up, after sports, ARE you stressed by TOO MUCH INFORMATION? Dick Steele has the surprising facts!"
This is where filters come in. That's part of what newspapers and TV news and stuff does in theory, they go through all the news and information and filter it to what's important. Of course, most of their job is supposed to be going out and finding that news, but in this day and age their real job is to make the advertisers happy, since the advertising is what pays their salary, so the advertisers are the real customers. The explosion of the 'net has made all sorts of information more available, and has made a lot of other filters available. From the obvious, like slashdot or Metafilter or Google News, to tiny little things like this right here. There's also automatic filters, like RSS feeds and automated news sites and so on. Though none of that is nearly as good yet as a good secretary or personal assistant, which is still the preferred choice of the rich.
The problem with any kind of filter like that though is it's somebody else's decisions about what's important, and they can always miss something YOU think is important. On the other hand, there's a lot of problems with people being easily able to ignore large chunks of news and information too. But I've drifted quite a bit from my original point. One last diversion, though. When you have a mass of unorganized information, the human brain is great at finding patterns. That's one of the main things it seems like our brains have evolved to do. We do it so well we can find patterns in the completely random. A bewildering array of patterns, depending on which bits we choose to pay attention and mark as important.
Back on to my original point. I need to learn to filter better, just so I spend less time reading over every bloody thing, and actually post about things and get things done and so on.
But there's another point here too. As a nerd and a sort-of writer, I probably worry too much about the importance of ideas in and of themselves. Alone, ideas don't really mean much. They're important in what they can get people to actually do. That was the last part of the little story about the Virtual Adepts, they had changed so instead of just tossing information out there, they tried to get specific information where it would matter. The ideas just there where nobody sees them or does anything because of them might as well not be there. Now it's true, using ideas to get people to do things is awfully close to the Dark Arts of Spin and Marketing, it's really exactly the same. But really, persuasion is like any other tool, it can be used for good or evil. And yes, even putting information out there specifically so people can use it to make up their own minds about something is trying to persuade them. You're trying to persuade them to think, and that's hard.
It was something like this. In the old version, the ethos was the hacker slogan "Information wants to be free!" so thematically, they grabbed whatever they could and threw it out there. But in the newer edition, the focus changed, because it wasn't working. Information might want to be free, but throwing everything out there was just dumping out a mess, with nothing to separate the important from the unimportant. Too much information doesn't mean more stuff happens, it slows stuff down since people have to go through all the information to find what they need.
And this seemed relevant today, since I was catching up on what had happened on the Internet since I hadn't been on much for a couple days, and because of the linkdump post I made with several things I had wanted to write more about but hadn't gotten to. A couple of them I still plan to write something about, really. But there were so many things I was finding that I wanted to say something about, I just kept finding new ones and throwing the old ones on a pile of bookmarks. It's the same kind of thing as the story bit above. And I'm hardly the first person to have that happen, there's plenty of wonks and self-help gurus who are trying to turn "information overload" into one of those breathless reports on the local evening news. "And coming up, after sports, ARE you stressed by TOO MUCH INFORMATION? Dick Steele has the surprising facts!"
This is where filters come in. That's part of what newspapers and TV news and stuff does in theory, they go through all the news and information and filter it to what's important. Of course, most of their job is supposed to be going out and finding that news, but in this day and age their real job is to make the advertisers happy, since the advertising is what pays their salary, so the advertisers are the real customers. The explosion of the 'net has made all sorts of information more available, and has made a lot of other filters available. From the obvious, like slashdot or Metafilter or Google News, to tiny little things like this right here. There's also automatic filters, like RSS feeds and automated news sites and so on. Though none of that is nearly as good yet as a good secretary or personal assistant, which is still the preferred choice of the rich.
The problem with any kind of filter like that though is it's somebody else's decisions about what's important, and they can always miss something YOU think is important. On the other hand, there's a lot of problems with people being easily able to ignore large chunks of news and information too. But I've drifted quite a bit from my original point. One last diversion, though. When you have a mass of unorganized information, the human brain is great at finding patterns. That's one of the main things it seems like our brains have evolved to do. We do it so well we can find patterns in the completely random. A bewildering array of patterns, depending on which bits we choose to pay attention and mark as important.
Back on to my original point. I need to learn to filter better, just so I spend less time reading over every bloody thing, and actually post about things and get things done and so on.
But there's another point here too. As a nerd and a sort-of writer, I probably worry too much about the importance of ideas in and of themselves. Alone, ideas don't really mean much. They're important in what they can get people to actually do. That was the last part of the little story about the Virtual Adepts, they had changed so instead of just tossing information out there, they tried to get specific information where it would matter. The ideas just there where nobody sees them or does anything because of them might as well not be there. Now it's true, using ideas to get people to do things is awfully close to the Dark Arts of Spin and Marketing, it's really exactly the same. But really, persuasion is like any other tool, it can be used for good or evil. And yes, even putting information out there specifically so people can use it to make up their own minds about something is trying to persuade them. You're trying to persuade them to think, and that's hard.
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no subject
Date: 2007-02-26 07:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-26 02:55 pm (UTC)The thing that I don't like, however, is that filtering can be abused. We've seen it happen a lot lately, where a political force persuades the media to gloss over certain facts in order to get their way. It really gets me when they use spin doctoring to justify things that just wouldn't fly in a truly educated society. If people learned to do more of their own filtering, perhaps they'd learn to be a little more discriminate of filtering done by the official channels.
you think?