The title of a fascinating Clay Shirky presentation has it that “It’s not information overload, it’s filter failure”, and though I rely extensively on filters to make my online life manageable, I find myself wanting to quibble with Shirky.
After years of discovering a new information resource, being consumed by it, finding it too much to bear, then getting on top of it, only to find myself being sucked under by another, faster information resource, I’ve concluded that the real secret to beating information overload isn’t better filters: it’s cultivating a “probabilistic” frame of mind.
The first online resources I used were dial-up bulletin board systems in the 1980s. At one point, I created accounts on every single BBS that I could connect to with a local phone call (in Canada, where I grew up, local calls weren’t metered, but long distance calls were charged by the minute). That was because most of my local bulletin board systems were hobbyist systems with one or two phone lines, and most of the time, a connection attempt would be foiled by a busy signal.
In order to get my fill of online time, I’d have to create logins on dozens of systems and try to call them all until I found one that was free. Then the number of bulletin board systems increased, as did the number of lines the average BBS sported, and the number of users on bulletin board systems.
Many of them joined up with syndication systems such as FIDONet, which imported the online discussions from distant bulletin board systems all over the world. I went from reading every word posted on every BBS to reading just a few choice forums. Then I had to winnow down the list of bulletin board systems I used, and then further winnow the list of groups I read.
Struggles
Finally, I had to content myself with skimming most of these groups and actively participating in a small number of groups that were right up my street. This was a real struggle at first. There is a world of difference between reading every word uttered in a community and reading just a few choice ones. But soon the anxiety gave way to contentment and even delight: it turned out that “overload” has a wonderful corollary: redundancy.
Anything really worth seeing wouldn’t just appear once and vanish. The really interesting stuff would find its way into other discussions, and early conferencing systems made it easy enough to back my way through the forums I was ignoring or skimming to find the important thing I’d missed.
This pattern went on to repeat itself again and again. Once, I could read all the Usenet discussion groups my ISP carried, then only a selection, and then only one or two plus a longer list of groups I’d dip into now and again when time allowed.
Again and again, this pattern re-emerges: once I could read all the tweets emitted by everyone I followed on Twitter; now I just skim the last 20 or 30 a few times a day and rely on retweets to bubble the good stuff to the top (I do my bit by retweeting things when I think they deserve it).
There are fascinating implications for a world of probabilistic resource use: for one thing, it points up the importance of “signal amplification” through retweets, reposts, and other recycling of interesting tit-bits — these are critical to the successful use of a medium that can’t be consumed by any one person from tip to tail.
It also suggests that the most important strategy for coping with information overload is to simply relax and not worry about missing the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity lurking somewhere in one of your inboxes — it’ll be around again shortly. – Guardian News & Media 2011.