No, I do not believe that society should focus on addressing
information overload. If you have access to the Internet, the knowledge you can
attain is literally endless. Place that on top of all the books, music, news
sources, etc. (which almost all are also available via the Internet) and you
could definitely “overload” your brain with information. But that is your own
choice.
Life is definitely changing. Whether you are looking for the
latest news on U.S. politics or trying to keep track of your friends’ lives,
the ways of doing this just keep expanding. This can be overwhelming for a lot
of people but I think we all just need to calm down and take a deep breath. We
need to appreciate all of these different sources of information and, once we
get the hang of it, it really isn’t as stressful as it appears. You’ll get
comfortable with all of your different options and figure out what methods of
using information technology suit you best. This is where filter-failure comes
in.
As Clay Shirky emphasizes, society is not being negatively
affected by information overload, but rather by filter failure. This means
that, although the information out there is ever increasing, we need to improve
our ways of “filtering” out what we want to see and not see instead of claiming
that the growing information should be stopped or slowed down. In some cases,
on the Internet, this is already happening. As Rhodri Marsden points out, we
all know our favorite TV channels, radio stations, and mainstream news sources.
Also, we are getting better at ignoring the time-wasting things, like pop-up
adds saying you have won one million dollars. As the information available
increases, we need to increase our filtering abilities.
People like Tracey Gaughran, a full-time blogger, believe
that if we find this filtering tedious or annoying, we are not doing it
correctly. “Twitter is about following these tiny snapshots of people’s
day-to-day lives. And that’s boring and tiresome only if you pick the wrong
people to follow.” Twitter can also be for following celebrities you are
interested in, news media for the latest breaking news, or just some random
stranger that you think leads an interesting life. I too believe that if you
get overwhelmed and frustrated by the Tweets you are seeing, change it
yourself! Stop following a certain someone and maybe follow someone else.
Practice makes perfect. Regarding other types of filtering, once you figure out
your favorite way to read the latest world news, whether it’s just one
informative news website or several different news blogs, the rewards are
immense. Instead of worrying about how to handle all of the information
available to us, we just need to get better at choosing which information we
pay attention to. Everyone has there own personal tastes, it is part of what
makes us so unique, so we need to apply this not only to how we judge what we
are seeing, but what we are seeing in the first place. Once we all have our own
personal, fine-tuned ways of filtering through this abundance of sources, I think
that everyone will be more relaxed about this overwhelming amount of
information.
So go out and explore. It will take you awhile to understand
the huge amount of information being shared by people on the Internet, but isn’t
it amazing?
Graphic Sources:
I really enjoyed your blog and agree with what you had to say. Rather than the information being an overload for us, how we filter information seems to be the true problem. You brought up a lot of great points in your argument to bring about your point such as to stop following someone on twitter if its not what you want to hear. There is no reason for us to continuously suffer through unwanted information when we ourselves are the guider of our own destiny when it comes to the internet and what we want to hear/learn. It is our choice so we should chose correctly and it will help us filter out the unnecessary and unwanted information. For your next blog maybe grab your reader with a more interesting hook and check grammar, but other than that I thought you really got your point across and had good sources.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you on the idea that we as a population need to work on our filtering rather than slow the flow of information. However, I disagree because information overload is not all about news, television, Twitter, Facebook, and the radio. You did mention pop-up ads and how people are getting better at ignoring them, but it is impossible to completely ignore something that "pops-up" when you do not want it to. I think that we do need to get better at filtering the information we want to receive. But I think it is important to recognize that more and more information is emerging and it is impossible to be a "master filterer".
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