Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Situational overload and ambient overload - 0 views
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"It's not information overload. It's filter failure."
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Clay Shirky
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2008.
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Better filters don't mitigate information overload; they intensify it. It would be more accurate to say: "It's not information overload. It's filter success."
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Information overload actually takes two forms, which I'll call situational overload and ambient overload, and they need to be treated separately.
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Situational overload is the needle-in-the-haystack problem
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even though the amount of information available to us has exploded in recent years, the problem of situational overload has continued to abate
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Ambient overload doesn't involve needles in haystacks. It involves haystack-sized piles of needles
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We keep clicking links, keep hitting the refresh key, keep opening new tabs, keep checking email in-boxes and RSS feeds, keep scanning Amazon and Netflix recommendations - and yet the pile of interesting information never shrinks
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The real source of information overload, at least of the ambient sort, is the stuff we like, the stuff we want. And as filters get better, that's exactly the stuff we get more of.
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precisely because the information is of interest to us, we feel pressure to attend to it. As a result, our sense of overload increases
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When the amount of information available to be filtered is effectively unlimited, as is the case on the Net, then every improvement in the quality of filters will make information overload worse.
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Jane Jacobs makes the same point about streets and traffic congestion. Keep building more bigger and better streets, and more cars will come.
