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There are millions of contestants in the Great Race. After several minutes of arduous race, only a few survive the final lap.
After more intense struggle, only one out of the millions win. Natural Processes are adept at filtering what they want, from a great number of things.
Yet, we complain of information overload. All we need is a device that conducts this Great Race, so that only the fittest information survives.
It is not possible to design one generic Great Race for everybody. Instead, the context in which the Race happens, needs to be handcrafted, by quietly observing one's likes and dislikes and to what one pays attention to.
After much usage, the Great Race would have been perfected enough, to get you the 6 things that you like from the 6,568,234 things.
Information Overload is an empty term. Just like Nature, Algorithms are waiting to create this recursive structure, of the 6things you like from the 6things. from the 6things you like... As they say, to iterate is human, to recurse divine.
One of my buddies chuckled about a press release that the company he worked for, gave in 1998. The Press Release goes on to quote him, that he was mandated to give email to everyone.
The Big Machine(Internet) is like the Elephant in remembering things. Though, my buddy did not have too much control over such a message, we in this Social Media times have control over what we choose to share.
One has to be careful about what video we upload in YouTube, the tweets and what information we give out in Facebook and so forth.
After a few years of active sharing, the Johari Window about people's personal life is likely to be closed and would be open only a tad bit. But,there is one trend which is unlikely to be reversed, i.e., the connected consumption part.
i.e., sharing about the books you liked, the movies you enjoyed, the youtubes you laughed about, the pithy quotes, the TED Video you resonated with, ...the list is endless.
Boiling this connected consumption slivers, into meaningful patterns would make this great big machine into a perpetual consumption machine.
They taught us in Elementary School that, the water we consume is what the Dinosaurs drank way back, due to the Water Cycle. Similarly this perpetual consumption machine needs a personal information cycle, to discover new content from other people's information cycle and deliver us pure content forever.
"I estimate that the ratio of useless to relevant reading material is about twenty to one. With that in mind, my advice it to reduce the literary inflow to a maximum of two newspapers a day, two weekly magazines, and two publications in a specialized field. Get off distribution lists. The reward will be an opportunity to engage in that underappreciated occupation, contemplation." - 'Maverick', Ricardo Semler.
Maverick was written over 16 years before the great information Tsunami, i.e., the fastflip, wikipedia, blogs, tweets, the RSS Reader and the other 6,586,4554 ways in which we can get information.
So, while the principle will remain invariant,namely, one should spend time to think, rather than constantly consume information, the prescription needs to be overhauled. In fact, because of the overwhelming number of sources and the rate of change of the medium, it is impossible to come up with any sort of prescription.
When we thought, we had finally settled on the 10 blogs, that we are finally going to care about, a group of people are postulating, that blogs are old and that Lifestream is the new buzzword. It is beyond question, that lifestreams would be replaced by yet another trend.
It becomes more and more crucial that we need a system that would infer one's likes and dislikes, prioritize slivers of interest and constantly prune sources and provide the individual with enough time to what Ricardo Semler characterizes as "Aristotle, who didn't subscribe to The Wall Street Journal once said, 'Thinking requires leisure time.'"
Information overload is an empty term. Just like bees and ants are 'programmed' to work, we need to design a whole species that process data, so that we would be able to spend time on that crucial occupation, contemplation.
