Social media expert Debbie Weil has a great post concerning information overload. She doesn't think much of the notion. "There has always been a river of information," she says.
Which isn't to say that Ms. Weil isn't as concerned as anyone else about being inundated with information about her world. She is indeed concerned, and like most other educated people, she looks for ways to cull and sift through the information flowing into her to pick out what's important to her. And she adds that people have always chosen information to read through the lens of their biases.
The point she adds, though, is that information overload has been around for a long time. Before it was RSS feeds and blog posts and Twitter streams and Facebook walls, it was magazines and newspapers. The morning and afternoon newspapers, Time, Newsweek, and Life, and titles before them like Saturday Evening Post and Collier's, all piled up. Choices had to be made back then, too. Our parents and grandparents fretted about too much information and also made choices to cut down what they consumed.
Ms. Weil notes that the rate of information has gone from a trickling stream to a fire hose. But we do what we've always done: applied bias to make decisions about the information we select. And now we have the benefit of technical tools that follow our instructions in pulling information for us.
Me? I use NetNewsWire to cull and group the RSS feeds I've chosen. I use GlobeReader and TimesReader to handle my daily newspapers online (and still be a legitimate — and paying! — subscriber). I have an RSS reader on my iPhone. I try more and more to shift incoming news information off of email so it's available just for personal communication.
And in her post, Ms. Weil introduced me to Guy Kakasaki's excellent AllTop.com. I'm so pleased with the choices he's made — kind of a Drudge Report for the web/tech/social networking crowd.
I hope Ms. Weil won't mind that her post takes me back to an influential evening in my life about six years ago when the historian David McCullough delivered a lecture to a packed auditorium in Indianapolis on the nature of studying the American Revolution. The talk occurred after publication of his John Adams but before the follow-on book, 1776.
Mr. McCullough noted that American colonists and independent Americans were remarkably well informed about events and thinking in their communities and even in distant communities on the Atlantic seaboard and even in Europe. News traveled far more slowly — at the pace of a horse or the whims of a ship under sail. But the information did travel, it was consumed, analyzed, and made the basis for action and public and private behavior. I wonder if the Americans of the Eighteenth Century worried about information overload. Somehow, among the thought leaders, I like to think they might have been.
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