Social Entrepreneurship

The Danger of Too Much Information

by Nathaniel Whittemore

category: Dissent

Published June 30, 2009 @ 10:12AM PT

frog design's Nick de la Mare wrote a really great piece the other day about the danger of over information. In short, he suggests that as the streams of information around us become overwhelming, we begin to find ways to filter, sort, and avoid things we dont feel add real value. The danger becomes that we, to use his words, "chose too narrowly." He starts with a great historical discovery, a quote from a newspaper in 1893 about what the world would look like 100 years later:

In 1893 the Newark Ohio Daily Advocate ran a series of articles predicting what the world would look like in a hundred years. "Every person" they said, "of fairly good education and of restless mind writes a book. As a rule, it is a superficial book, but it swells the bulk and it indicated the cerebral unrest that is trying to express itself. We have arrived at a condition in which more books are printed than the world can read. This is true not only of books that are not worth reading, but it is true of the books that are. All this I take to be the result of an intellectual enfranchisement that is new, and of a dissemination of knowledge instead of concentration of culture. Everybody wants to say something. But it is slowly growing upon the world that everybody has not got something to say. Therefore one may even at this moment detect the causes which will produce reaction. In 100 years there will not be so many books printed, but there will be more said. That seems to me to be inevitable."

His point is, of course, that while we're not all writing books, we're all Tweeting, Status Updating, and broadcasting ourselfs constantly, in the process, congesting the general cognitive space with far more bits and bytes than anyone can handle. The question becomes: what happens next? The natural tendency is to find ways to filter. Indeed, new business models are being born to help people better filter and discover the information they actually care about. The problem, and the paradox as de la Mare puts it, is that in a world of so much information, it becomes easy to just select that information which confirms our own understanding of the world, never challenging us to think differently.

The huge number of information streams before us gives the power to choose only those that are agreeable, to reinforce our culture and values at the exclusion of the new and uncomfortable. One of the nice things about standing under a waterfall of information is that you are forced to engage with viewpoints and perspectives you wouldn't have chosen on your own.

It's a great piece, and an important reminder of the underside of the information age.