We’re drowning in a sea of information. Yet once upon a time our remote ancestors could wade through just a shallow puddle of data. We’re exposed to as much information in just a few days or weeks now as our remote ancestor had to deal with throughout their entire lifespan. While data has exploded exponentially, especially in the 20th Century but especially, especially since the advent of the Internet, our ability to find just those few drops we really need within the downpour; process it and keep it in long term memory for immediate and useful retrieval, hasn’t proceeded afoot. In fact, it’s now often the case that keeping abreast of even one personal or professional topic generates more data drops than we can comfortably absorb. It’s overwhelming us because our brains; our wetware’s capacity is still a constant, as steady-as-she-goes capability now as it was 10,000 years ago when data drops were relatively few and far between.
When you’re born, you know nothing about everything. Towards the end-of-your-days, you probably know a massive amount, but about relatively little. A top rated concert violin player might be hopeless at understanding and mastering the intricacies of the piano. You might be a grand master in chess but can’t understand the finer points about baseball. A Nobel Prize winner in quantum physics might understand nothing about rocket science. A master at painting, varnishing, staining or shellacking wood might be a disaster at carpentry. Even if you were smart enough, and had the sufficient dexterity, no person today could be equally an expert knowledgeable in the violin and the piano and chess and baseball and quantum physics and rocket science and painting woodwork and carpentry. Those days are long gone. From jack of all trades and master of none, it’s now jack of one sub-trade and barely able to master that.
Once upon a time relatively few people could read or write. What ‘books’ existed were hand copied on birch bark or papyrus or carved in stone or painted on walls. Only one or perhaps at most several dozen copies existed in any one locality. There might be, for really significant works, a few copies that were translated into other languages. Translated, whether translated or not, anyone who could read and write could easily be acquainted with nearly the sum total of available human knowledge as expressed in some physical form or other.
Fast forward slightly, and humans invented the printing press. Relatively more (percentage wise) of the human population could also now read and write. The number of copies of books available to those still relatively few humans with the time and ability to read could now number in the many hundreds to multi thousands. Still, with a higher population, and a greater percentage of that ever increasing population able to digest the wisdom of others, well, it was getting somewhat problematical that anyone could be universally educated in all things.
Fast forward several more generations to the 1800’s and early 1900’s, and books were becoming a dime-a-dozen. More and more people were educated enough to read these pulps (as often they were) or dime novels often called because they cost a dime. Still, it was still reasonable to acquire a very broad education, and relative easy to still keep up with any particular genre of knowledge, or at least all of a subgenre – say science, or at least all of physics.
At least back then they didn’t have, in addition, information being pumped at them 24/7 by radio, TV and the Internet.
Fast forward a bit more and books, newspapers and magazines were everywhere. Numeracy and literacy were, if not yet universal, getting closer and closer to that objective. Lots of people in theory could tell the world their tale(s). However, publishing by any individual had to go through a lot of red tape and the most that most of the great unwashed could expect was perhaps a letter-to-the-editor in their local rag-sheet (sorry, newspaper), or a few seconds on talkback radio for by now radio & TV was blowing you away with their information content (mostly forgettable) and their ads (very forgettable).
Then came the electronics revolution. In particular the personal computer and the Internet revolutionized the science of information publishing and distribution. Now all of a relative sudden the great unwashed could bypass nearly any publishing filter, any editor, and write (post) whatever rubbish they felt the rest of the world deserved to know. Instead of having an established, say, ten million professional and established authors, journalists, and academics, one now has several billion authors (posters) – Twitter this; Facebook that; submitting all sorts or rubbishy (and not so rubbishy) essays on all manner of blogs, personal and corporate, not to mention a plethora of message boards on various web sites. Some message board posters can always seem to manage to post the equivalent of a full-length novel in a month – every month. One Internet thousand word essay/article/news item can now generate hundreds to thousands of online viewer comments (when in the olden days you might get one or two letters-to-the-editor and some talkback radio chitchat) all of which in theory you should also read and fully absorb in order to be fully informed on the issue in question. Anyone could now contribute to an online encyclopaedia or an Internet site devoted to articles on any and every topic you could care to expound upon, or even host their own personal website, inviting all and sundry to have a look-see at their ‘wisdom’.
Part of the information overload problem was the requirement in academic circles to “publish or perish”. I wonder how many professional papers were churned out not because they contributed anything of great significance, but that it was another bit to add to your publications résumé.
Now does it matter so much how much information is out there as long as you feel your own personal information needs are adequately catered for and that you’re coping with what comes your way? From that narrow perspective, probably not.
Does it matter how much information is out there as long as you can find out what you want when you want it? Well, yes, it does matter. Say you want an introductory laypersons guide to quantum physics in book form. Unfortunately, there about thirty such books on the market. Knowing nothing in advance about the subject, how do you choose? Do you pick the most recent; the one with lots of pictures and no maths; the cheapest; the one with Miss Quantum 21st Century gracing the cover; look at Amazon.com customer reviews; or do you call up a quantum physics professor at a nearby university for a recommendation? – Decisions, decisions.
Or say you want some reliable information on ‘crop circles’ and you plug the phrase into Google.com – as I did a few minutes ago – and get over five million hits. You start ploughing through them one by one – how do you know which site of the first 100 is the best? Do you stop at 100 even though maybe hit number 101 is the best and most reliable? Maybe you need to select several for the most balanced coverage. Assuming you don’t have time to check out all five million plus hits, far less research the bona fides of each, well, you’ve been hit with information overload. You’re just going to have to pay your money (or commit your time) and take your chances.
The main problem, as highlighted by the ‘crop circle’ example, post Internet age, is to separate out the quality information from the rubbish; the wheat from the chaff. Even if you have a very narrow selection of interests, most of what you’ll find will be posted by self-styled experts, even downright nutters, relative to those who actually know what they are spouting on about. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to tell the crank from the merely competent to the relative expert.
Another problem is can professionals you rely on keep up-to-date themselves? – Probably not. It’s to your detriment that your local GP really needs a week to absorb new medical information, especially about new drugs, emerging diseases, treatments, tests, etc. that comes out daily. No one in the general medical profession can keep up anymore with the published or online output in medical and pharmacological research. I suspect that also applies to many already within various medical specialities. The trend to increasing specialization (you keep knowing more and more about less and less) within an already relatively narrow field has been going on for quite a while, and shows no sign of slowing down. There’s no such thing as a lawyer, rather there are property lawyers, criminal lawyers, copyright and trademark lawyers, patent lawyers, commercial lawyers, family lawyers, and those specializing in international law and trade law, plus a host of other legal-eagle divisions.
But things aren’t perhaps quite as bad as they seem. A massive amount of information is of only short-term value. Advertising is a case in point. Who now cares about ads for Model-T Fords from a century ago except perhaps a rare historian or automobile buff? Ads for real estate now long sold aren’t much interest. Old TV and radio jingles have at best nostalgic value; probably not even that to most people. And what about that weather forecast from 48 hours ago, forecasting the weather now 24 hours past. Well, who cares anymore – unless you’re doing an analysis of how frequently they get it wrong; which most of us acknowledge but hardly keep detailed records of. How many of us consult a telephone directory that’s more than a year out of date? Do 99.9% of us give a damn about what 99.9% of us Twitter?
Even if we read a tweet, it usually goes in one eyeball and out the other hardly pausing long enough to resister. So thank goodness for short term memory. Although it’s a bit of information from your life, do you really need to remember what you had for dinner 147 days ago? And thus your wetware’s storage processes those information needs accordingly.
Then there are the near duplications of many a common topic. I mean there’s got to be, on say the topic of how to quit smoking, several dozen books; thousands of articles, and probably tens of thousands of hits you’ll get on any Internet search engine, all saying pretty much the same thing. And does the world really need another cookbook to go with the literally million or so already published not to mention the billions of recipes that have appeared in all manner of magazines, mainly magazines directed at female readers – its overkill cubed. Hasn’t every variation on every basic recipe been done to death? I don’t own so much as a single cookbook yet I’ve had no problem feeding myself for decades now. And if you’ve read one romance novel, you’ve pretty much read them all. And isn’t the market really supersaturated with books about (fill in the blank yourself)? If you see one ad in the newspaper one day, and the same ad in a magazine the next, well you haven’t really received any new additional information you need to mentally process. All you’ve accomplished is the waste of another second or two realizing that.
And while “sex” might be the most popular search term plugged into Internet search engines, well there really are just a limited number of variations on the theme.
I recall the incident at work when my supervisor directed me to prepare a one page summary about asbestos. I found and printed off over a dozen identical summaries or ‘fact sheets’ about asbestos in actually way less time than it would have taken me to do one up from scratch. That didn’t move the boss one bit; I still had to add yet one more summary sheet on asbestos to the world’s collection of same! That was actually the straw that broke this camels’ back for I told him to stick his idiocy up an unmentionable place where the sun never shines and retired (which fortunately I was in a position to do).
Then too nearly all of the information produced probably has very little, if any, impact on your day-to-day life. If the Hadron Large Collider finds the Higgs Boson, it’s of interest to only several thousand theoretical physicists. Local politics halfway around the world has no bearing on your own council rates. A civil war in a remote African location, unless you’re personally there and involved, maybe of passing interest, even humanitarian concern, but for most of us that has only residual short term memory within our brain thingy. If there are say, one million units of information in the world, but only one unit has any relevance or interest to you, then maybe things are manageable. But, if one thousand units are of potential interest, yet your mental storage capacity, never mind your time available to absorb those one thousand units simply isn’t physically possible, then you’re suffering from information overload.
However, on a more positive note, information can serve as a fashion statement of sorts. It’s desirable to compress information into realms that don’t take up much space – like microfiche, hard disc drives; CD-R’s; iPods, eBooks and flash drives. It’s also important to be able to retrieve information quickly, and modern electronic storage and retrieval technology certainly assists. Google certainly has its advantages.
But on a more personal perspective, my own home is lined with thousands of books; several tens-of-thousands of CDs, and a few thousand DVDs. The thought of moving house and taking all of those with me is a nightmare I really don’t want to think about. However, I’ve not taken any move to transfer any of this collection to a more electronic and space-saving format(s). Why?
There’s something about having all those books, CDs, DVDs, even magazines on open display. They are as much a part of your furnishings as your choice in room wallpaper or paint job; what you hang on your wall; your knickknacks; what kind of car you drive; or what you have growing in your garden. They are an integral part of what makes you, you. Its part of the show-and-tell that makes up and defines your personality; your interests; your likes and dislikes; helps define why you are unique amongst every human who has ever lived or is alive today.
Looking at a computer or an iPad tells me nothing about what the computer or iPad’s owner’s interests are. Looking at their bookshelf crammed to the brink with books, CDs and DVDs tells me volumes about the owner.
Lastly, when the hard disc crashes; the power goes out; well the low-tech book keeps on keeping on. And you can’t swat a cockroach or prop up a wobbly table with your laptop! Books and other printed media are really one of history’s established long-lasting technologies; I think books (and other physical but non-print media as well) will be around for a long time to come yet, even if there are more books available to read than we have time to read them; more CDs available to listen to than we have time to hear them; more DVDs available than we have time to watch them all.
And yes, finally, I do realise that this very piece adds to the problem rather than to the solution, but then again, if you can’t beat them, join them!
Conclusion: Information overload is going to get worse before it gets better. Actually, until such time as we can evolve, bioengineer or genetically engineer a better brain thingy, there will be no improvement. Somehow we’ve got to match in parallel the exponential information increases with equivalent storage capacity in our wetware. Having the ability to search various electronic media for what we want, while extremely useful, isn’t quite the same as being able to draw off on and retrieve that same material from within our own software – our wetware.
