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.”)

Google solved the situational overload problem. It’s the ambient overload that most people complain about:

“We keep clicking links, keep hitting the refresh key, keep opening new tabs, keep checking email in-boxes and RSS feeds and Facebook notifications, keep scanning Amazon and Netflix recommendations – and yet the pile of interesting information never shrinks.”

Or as Carr summarizes the difference:

“The cause of situational overload is too much noise. The cause of ambient overload is too much signal.”

And he points out:

“As today’s filters improve, they expand the information we feel compelled to take notice of. Yes, they winnow out the uninteresting stuff (imperfectly), but they deliver a vastly greater supply of interesting stuff. And precisely because the information is of interest to us, we feel pressure to attend to it. As a result, our sense of overload increases.”

So what’s the solution? Carr says, half tongue-in-cheek:

“If you really want a respite from information overload, pray for filter failure.”