What Media Overload are you Talking About?
When the discussion comes to Twitter, Facebook and Co. sooner or later somebody will state that all this stuff is just causing media overload. “People will drown in information!” they claim.
Maybe I am a little slow, but I don’t get it. Just a quick glance around in a normal wood (that’s the areas with bad WLAN, and lot’s of brown and green stuff) will provide your eyes with much more data than you can handle. The trick of course is filtering and aggregation. You don’t think about things like “Oh, my 53264th photoreceptor saw something pretty bright, and the right next to it, number 53265 sees something dark” you think about a chess problem you are seeing, or a zebra or tree trunks.
Ok, these are all pretty natural stuff, but Twitter and Facebook are artificial right? So there is a complete new dimension to it, right? Wrong. Even at the end of the last millennium there was so much stuff written, that nobody could handle it all. Even when you tried to follow a very specific area in the appropriate journals, you got swamped fast. And by narrow I mean something like ‘numerical simulations of atoms or molecules in intense laser fields’. Trust me, I tried it for some time. But again the trick is filtering and aggregation. You skim the abstract, check the authors for known names and decide, if the article is interesting for you. If an article slips through your net, you will notice it, when it gets referenced by multiple other articles. And it works just like that with Twitter, Facebook & Co.
The big difference is: yes, you have even more stuff that might be interesting, but you also have much more powerful ways to filter and aggregate.
Of course if you just follow everybody, read every tweet and click every link, you won’t get much else done. But without the Internet you’d probably busy zapping through a couple hundred TV channels.
there will be a lot of victims until everyone knows how much information they can take at once, how to filter it appropriately and aggregate all those relevant fragments for themselves, but it will eventually lead to a more differentiated consumption of information. at least in theory…
some people will definitely drown in information, but it has always taken some time for people to get used to new stuff. In this case the internet just turns all former sources of information upside down.
some have to take one step back and take a look at how they are currently communicating.
Ask themselves, is this the right medium? Does it make the communication easier?
people will need to start learning again. noone can tell you how you should use services like twitter.
Developers seem to strive to handle more and more information at once, make it even more convenient to access information and so on. I often meet people that just cannot or simply don’t want to handle that much information as I do, though they are constantly flooded with information from sources they cannot handle.
you’re right: in the end the internet leaves us with far more powerful tools to filter and aggregate the vast load of information, yet first people have to know how to find and use the right tools.
just my random thoughts on a sunday