Information overflow crazyness
on July 22, 2008Yesterday I started writing an innocent blog entry. Starting with the fact that due to being German I might just get about 82% of the English articles I read. On top of that there’s far too much information which makes me skip through stuff, so how much information might get stuck in my head at the end of the day and how distorted it is by then?
Doing some research on the topic to find out how others deal with that, Nicolas Carr added the concern to not only miss out and distort information but also loose the ability to concentrate and in the end become stupid . Well, I freaked a bit but thinking about it we might acquire more than we loose. I already dealt with the realization that I can’t read every book every written and a fair amount might not even be worth it, same with the Internet. But I’ll still be proud of every finished book I put back on the shelve and every article I’ve read and mostly also learned something from.
So I finally calmed down, believing the information overflow is not really a problem it’s just the way things are. Then ProBlogger Darren came along with the brilliant idea of connecting all his readers social media stuff. I clicked and added and read and even finally joined Twitter.
It’s a total catastrophe and I love it!
“Nostalgia for the accidental scarcity we’ve just emerged from is just a sideshow; the main event is trying to shape the greatest expansion of expressive capability the world has ever known.” (taken from the brilliant answer to the Nicolas Carr article by Clay Shirky)
