Praying for Filter Failure!
A couple of years back, I wrote about the complaint of people drowning in the endless stream of information that is available online. Clay Shirky’s response (“It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.”) from 2008 made perfect sense to me. Recently, I stumbled upon Nick Carr’s argument that Shirky only got it backwards. The reason many feel swamped is, as per Carr? “It’s not information overload. It’s filter success.” The exact opposite of what Shirky said! And it sounds completely wrong. And so Carr elaborates. Carr points out there are 2 types of information overload: 1) Situational overload (“You need a particular piece of information…and that piece of information is buried in a bunch of other pieces of information.”) 2) Ambient overload (“We’re surrounded by so much information that is of immediate interest to us that we feel overwhelmed by the neverending pressure of trying to keep up with it all.”...