So, the real question is, how do we design filters that let us find our way through this particular abundance of information? And, you know, my answer to that question has been: the only group that can catalog everything is everybody. One of the reasons you see this enormous move towards social filters, as with Digg, as with del.icio.us, as with Google Reader, in a way, is simply that the scale of the problem has exceeded what professional catalogers can do. But, you know, you never hear twenty-year-olds talking about information overload because they understand the filters they’re given. You only hear, you know, forty- and fifty-year-olds taking about it, sixty-year-olds talking about because we grew up in the world of card catalogs and TV Guide. And now, all the filters we’re used to are broken and we’d like to blame it on the environment instead of admitting that we’re just, you know, we just don’t understand what’s going on.
I've been seeking a way to explain why I introduce Diigo along with Information fluency skills in the E-Learning for Educators Course. This article quickly draws the big picture. Folks seeking to become online teachers are pursuing a specialized teaching skill that requires an information filtering strategy as well as what Rheingold calls "a mental cognitive and social strategy for how you're going to deploy your attention."
