Information Saturation and Filtering
Saturday, October 3, 2009 by ltop
Gergen claims that we have become saturated with information through technology and one must wonder if this is good or bad. With all the new ways of accessing information on the internet the amount of information available at the click of a button is unprecedented. I think that it can be good or bad depending on the situation. For e.g. searching for something such as which Asian restaurant to eat at gives you a list of a thousand different places, each claiming to be the best. What do you do with that? Most users are not adept at information filtering so all this information is a bad thing at the end because you end up choosing randomly anyway, without much basis behind your choice. For a research student on the other hand, all this information can be a God send. What would previously take you weeks to look up in a library can now take you hours through journal sites, conference sites, Google Scholar, etc.
The good arguments more or less say that new media has enabled a gold mine of information. While the bad arguments focus on the fact that it is very difficult to distinguish between good/correct and bad/incorrect information and that knowing a little bit about a subject can be worse than not knowing anything at all (and it's almost impossible to look at every bit of information about a subject).
So the issue of information saturation is how we filter the information. The tech is out there (for example recommender systems) and the Internet is not going anywhere. All this information is staying whether we like it or not, so the best way to go about dealing with information saturation is by researching filtering tech.
In 2006, Larry Page (one of the founders of Google) said: "People always make the assumption that we are done with search. That's very far from the case. We're probably only 5 percent of the way there. We want to create the ultimate search engine that can understand anything ... some people could call that artificial intelligence." (Link)
The good arguments more or less say that new media has enabled a gold mine of information. While the bad arguments focus on the fact that it is very difficult to distinguish between good/correct and bad/incorrect information and that knowing a little bit about a subject can be worse than not knowing anything at all (and it's almost impossible to look at every bit of information about a subject).
So the issue of information saturation is how we filter the information. The tech is out there (for example recommender systems) and the Internet is not going anywhere. All this information is staying whether we like it or not, so the best way to go about dealing with information saturation is by researching filtering tech.
In 2006, Larry Page (one of the founders of Google) said: "People always make the assumption that we are done with search. That's very far from the case. We're probably only 5 percent of the way there. We want to create the ultimate search engine that can understand anything ... some people could call that artificial intelligence." (Link)