#information-overload

Infobesity

A Brief Guide to Handling Information Overload Posted by Alexei Chapko on March 18, 2014Key points:"- know what's important- Know What You Want to Know- interest-based topic restrictions- keywords, categories of interest, recommendations- knowing who's talking about what and how they're talking about it differently- Forget the Early Bird: Keeping up isn't a competition with your friends.Instead, your friends can be your greatest assets when trying to keep informed.Second to you, they're probably the best judge of whether something will interest your or not."Hence:Content Management collaboration (community) tools, taxonomy curation (collaborate on categorisation)...We can only face this collaboratively.

THERE IS A wonderful essay in The Hedgehog Review about the promise and perils of information overload. Titled Why Google Isn’t Making Us Stupid…or Smart, this essay written by Chad Wellmon explores the history of information overload and explores its implications. But Wellmon also spends some time demonstrating that information overload is far from a new problem: These complaints have their biblical antecedents: Ecclesiastes 12:12, “Of making books there is no end”; their classical ones: Seneca, “the abundance of books is a distraction”; and their early modern ones: Leibniz, the “horrible mass of books keeps growing.” After the invention of the printing press around 1450 and the attendant drop in book prices, according to some estimates by as much as 80 percent, these complaints took on new meaning. As the German philosopher and critic Johann Gottfried Herder put it in the late eighteenth century, the printing press “gave wings” to paper.