Learning Ecosystems

Overcoming Information Overload

In a similar manner, we too must focus and filter.  In 2008, Clay Shirky gave a speech at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York City entitled, “It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure.“  In it he says, “We are to information overload as fish are to water. It’s just what we swim in. Itz Acrobean, a man who would know once said, ‘If you have the same problem for a long time, maybe it’s not a problem.  Maybe it’s a fact…’ What’s changing now is the filters we have used (over the last 500 years) are breaking.”  He goes on to say that the solution won’t come from tweaking the old filters, but in creating new ones.

…

The matter of information overload comes back to supply and trust.  Give others the tools and knowledge to succeed and they will surprise you.

Two related postings:

1)  Kayaks vs Canoes: George Dyson on how media literacy has really changed — from Ewan McIntosh

George Dyson explains with more clarity than I’ve ever seen the principal difference in how we deal with information properly in 2010:

In the North Pacific ocean, there were two approaches to boatbuilding. The Aleuts (and their kayak-building relatives) lived on barren, treeless islands and built their vessels by piecing together skeletal frameworks from fragments of beach-combed wood. The Tlingit (and their dugout canoe-building relatives) built their vessels by selecting entire trees out of the rainforest and removing wood until there was nothing left but a canoe.

The Aleut and the Tlingit achieved similar results — maximum boat / minimum material — by opposite means. The flood of information unleashed by the Internet has produced a similar cultural split. We used to be kayak builders, collecting all available fragments of information to assemble the framework that kept us afloat. Now, we have to learn to become dugout-canoe builders, discarding unneccessary information to reveal the shape of knowledge hidden within (emphasis DSC).

I was a hardened kayak builder, trained to collect every available stick. I resent having to learn the new skills. But those who don’t will be left paddling logs, not canoes.

2)  Content Curation: Why Is The Content Curator The Key Emerging Online Editorial Role Of The Future? — from Robin Good’s blog