[wordup] Information Overload

[Adam Shand]

From: http://weblog.delacour.net/archives/2003/12/overloaded.php
Wednesday 03 December 2003
Overloaded

Am I the only one around here who feels overwhelmed by the volume of 
data I expect myself to absorb and process every day?

I just did a Google search for “information overload”. It yielded 
“about 296,000” results. The first, a 1994 Patti Maes paper on Agents 
that Reduce Work and Information Overload:

The metaphor used is that of a personal assistant who iscollaborating 
with the user in the same work environment. The assistant becomes 
gradually more effective as it learns the user’s interests, habits and 
preferences (as well as those of his or her community)…

The set of tasks or applications with which an agent can assist the 
user is virtually unlimited: information filtering, information 
retrieval, mail management, meeting scheduling, selection of books, 
movies, music, etc.

The second, a three-year-old InfoWorld article on Overcoming 
information overload:

Alan Lightman, a humanities professor and physics lecturer at the 
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, Mass., also takes 
a pessimistic view of the effect of technology on communication. People 
need to examine what they are getting into when they adopt 
technologies, he says.

“I think that the high-speed information technologies, while very 
useful in many ways, have robbed us of our necessary silences of time 
to reflect on values on who we are and where we’re going,” Lightman 
says.

The optimist and the pessimist: both from MIT.

I started to make a list of all the stuff I’m thinking about (let alone 
trying to write about) then gave up. It doesn’t really matter, given 
that functionally your list is identical to mine even if they don’t 
have even a single item in common. What’s important is the size of the 
list, not its contents.

I’m wondering whether I shouldn’t try to emulate my friend Karl, whom 
I’d describe as a late/reluctant adopter. In 1986, when I suggested 
that it might be useful to buy an external 400K floppy drive for his 
Macintosh Plus, he told me that the internal floppy drive was more than 
adequate. A couple of years ago he bought a television set and a VCR, 
having lived without television for the fifteen years I’ve known him. 
When I asked him last week whether he’d seen such-and-such on TV, he 
reminded me that his television wasn’t connected to any kind of 
antenna—he’d only bought it so that his young daughters could watch 
videos once or twice a week. Yesterday he called and asked me to send 
him a test email, to check that he hadn’t screwed up his email account 
while setting up his new ADSL connection. That surprised me. But I’d 
expect that within a month he’ll have figured out how to throttle back 
his high speed Internet access.

Karl’s not a Luddite. He has a notebook and a desktop machine and knows 
more about computing than most of the IT staff at the major hospital 
where he works as a neonatologist. Nor is he uninformed about local and 
international events: he listens to the radio a lot, mainly ABC Radio 
National (roughly the Australian equivalent of NPR). Not listening to 
the radio—not at home nor in the car—is perhaps my only means of 
filtering out information.

Even though he works longer hours than I do, Karl’s rigorous defence 
against the flow of unnecessary information provides him with far more 
time than I allow myself to read, to think, and to be silent. And even 
if ADSL turns out to offer a formidable challenge to his minimalist 
ethic, Karl has one huge advantage over me: he doesn’t blog.

Self-employment, a constant Internet connection, a weblog, and a mildly 
addictive personality turn out to be a killer combination—even for 
someone who no longer feels compelled to post regularly, let alone 
every day. Liz Lawley went cold turkey by taking a vacation with her 
family:

The best part of the trip was that by midweek I’d stopped blogging 
things in my head. I hadn’t realized how much I’d begun to detach from 
real life, always running meta-commentary in my head to save for later 
blogging. Letting go of that was very refreshing. It’s not that I don’t 
want to blog, it’s that I don’t want to do it all the time.

Although Liz didn’t say this explicitly, I think she realized that 
having a weblog turns information overload into a two-way process: 
first you suck all this stuff into your head for processing; and then 
you regurgitate it as weblog posts. And, while this process isn’t all 
that different from the ways in which we manipulate information in our 
jobs, it’s something that we’ve chosen to do in addition to our jobs, 
something that detaches us even further from “real life”. I suspect 
that the problem is compounded by the fact that weblog entries 
are—overwhelmingly—expressions of opinion and, to make it worse, many 
of the opinions are opinions about opinions on issues concerning which 
the opinionators have little, if any, firsthand knowledge or 
experience. Me included.

Now I’m beginning to understand what I valued so much about 
photography. Photographs are, to be sure, just as much a means of 
expressing an opinion as any other form of communication. But, somehow, 
its non-verbal nature confers upon the photograph an opacity that I 
find incredibly appealing, particularly if any captions are restricted 
to a spare description of the time, place, and (if appropriate) 
person’s name. I don’t, however, believe that this preference means 
that I’m assuming—in Jeff Ward’s words—that “there is an intrinsic 
quality to images which is either diluted or enhanced by the presence 
or absence of the caption”. It’s more that, for me, the absence of a 
comprehensive caption makes it more difficult for the photograph to 
trumpet an opinion. To paraphrase Lisette Model, the less the 
photograph tries to prove something, the more likely I am to get the 
lesson.

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The other thing I realize about all that time I spent taking pictures 
is that photography provided an amazingly effective choke on all the 
extraneous information that was trying to cram itself into my head. In 
those years, I was preoccupied with looking at photographs, shooting 
photographs, processing film and making prints, thinking about 
photography, and watching movies. But, despite the temptation posed by 
this new “analog” digital Leica, it’s unlikely that I’ll ever go back 
to photographing with the passion and commitment I once had.

I’m also beginning to realize why, when I abandoned photography, I took 
up studying Japanese. It (Japanese) offers the same kind of opacity 
that I valued in photographs, the opacity which ensured that I never 
really understood even my own photographs—particularly those I was 
proudest of. My last photographic project was a series taken in the 
neonatal intensive care ward at Karl’s hospital. A couple of years 
later he said to me, “Just as well you managed to replace photography 
with Japanese… that should keep you productively engaged until you 
die.”

Perhaps reading Japanese more than English offers one way of filtering 
out the information that threatens to overwhelm me, since my lack of 
expertise ensures that interpreting and understanding a Japanese 
sentence takes much longer than one in English. And, even though this 
is a strategy whose effectiveness will diminish as my facility with the 
language improves, it might provide me with a buffer until I can figure 
out other ways of dealing with all the excess data.

Another way might be to try to modify my relationship with my 
surroundings, in Godard’s words to “go on listening… go on looking 
about me even more attentively than before… the world… my fellow 
creatures… my brothers.”

Today Norm Jenson quoted Richard Feynman:

I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is 
much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that 
might be wrong.

To which I added, in a comment: “I also think it is much more 
interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be 
right.”

Again, paraphrasing Lisette Model, when you point your camera at 
something, (ideally) you are asking a question and the photograph is 
sometimes (the right or the wrong) answer.

So perhaps I’m thinking about the ideal weblog post as one that 
privileges questions over opinions. Except it’s more complex than that. 
After all, couldn’t an opinion expressed with subtlety and restraint be 
another way of asking a question?

Either way, my question is the one I asked at the beginning: who else 
feels overwhelmed by the volume of information we expect ourselves to 
absorb and process every day? And how do you manage to deal with it?
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