Ruminating Out Loud

So asks Seth Godin in a post that explores the implications of the explosion in content creation and dissemination. Below is an excerpt of the post:

… Of course, the decentralized nature of the net means that it will never be physically full. As long as we can keep making hard drives, we won’t run out of space to store those inane videos of your Aunt Sally. What is full is our attention.

Ten years ago, you had a shot of at least being aware of everything that mattered. Five years ago, you had to be really selective about what you took in, but at least it was possible to know what you didn’t know. Today, it’s impossible. Today, you can’t even read every article on a thin slice of a thin topic.

You can’t keep up with the status of your friends on the social networks. No way. You can’t read every important blog… you can’t even read all the blogs that tell you what the important blogs are saying.

Used to be, you could finish reading your email, hit “check email” and nothing new would show up. Now, of course, the new mail is probably a longer list than the mail you just finished processing.

The internet isn’t full, but we are.”

This is a wonderful observation. I do not think that this particular topic is properly examined. Of course, an observation that was previously made about Null Information concerns exactly with this issue that Seth is referring to. He is making note of the tremendous amount of content, and information about the content, that is being generated, and the relative scarcity of our own time and attention to make use of it. Indeed, even with the increased productivity and prolonged work-day, we have a limited amount of time and attention to be paid. On the contrary, what goes into the Null Information is rapidly expanding and explosively growing. One is a finite resource the other has an infinite room for growth, especially given how storage is becoming cheap and increasingly portable.

There are two issues this raises to me. One is the need for coming up with drastic evaluation, assortment and synthesis of information. This could be in the form of increased efficiency and exactness in location, indexing and delivery of relevant information (e.g. better search algorithms), or by tackling it with renewed vigor by the age-old approach of division-of-labor and specialization. More so than at any time before, there is a need for development of expertise, not necessarily only in filling once brain with an amount of knowledge about a body of information,  but also in locating where the information is/how it can be utilized/who can benefit most from it/ and making it readily accessible. The distributed nature of this task could allow for taking piece by piece on the behemoth that Null Information is becoming.

The other issue that this paradigm reminds of me is the limited nature of our foresightedness. Sure enough we have an explosion in the amount of information that is being made available and we are seeing a big danger sign staring us right in the face. But, my sense is that people in the old ages, when printing press was first discovered and made popular, were probably thinking of the same thing; fearing the rapid dissemination of all the information and knowledgethat is good and evil. Looking at it from today’s perspective it is difficult to argue that we have not fared well by the advent of the printing press, and we express little concern about all the books that are getting published in masses and filling up library shelves. The society as a whole has gradually figured out a way of filtering out, although still highly modulated and manipulated by marketing rather than substance of the books, what is relevant and important.

I think, in the long run, the issue is not going to be so much that there is just too much information out there that is beyond our ability to pay attention to, but it is rather about people, companies and society, at large, figuring out a way to organize and make infomation relevant and useful to the seeker.