Information Overload

I live hooked into the net, where most information is available in just a few keystrokes. In fact beyond that, now a lot of that information is automatically propagated to me in the form of RSS feeds or emails. For some time I've been struggling with the sheer volume of things being sent my way. There is so much information that I could spend all of my time just reading and trying to keep up with it, certainly it's distracting me from actually DOING things. Initially my response was to try and just ignore it all and batch mode my information acquiring, that is just spend 2 hours in a certain block each day looking up things. Unfortunately that didn't really seem to work very well. Next I thought about some way of tailoring the information that I get, this led to me thinking about trying to work out precisely what information i do want and how I normally go about getting it. Actually over the course of thinking about it I came to some interesting ideas about writing a kind of AI that would pretend to be me and sit on my computer automatically searching the net and then when I sat down in a morning present me with a list of interesting articles and prioritise my email for me to look at. Unsurprisingly others have already thought of such things though at the time of writing this, and from my brief investigations, there was nothing that really struck me as being too good. Still if anyone reading this has a recommendation please leave a comment!

A possible side effect of this information overload is lack of critical thinking. Recently it's struck me how many people are giving considerable amount of credence to fairly spurious arguments, often from the left (not that I think the entire lefts doctrine is spurious, simply that it seems the left are coming up with some increasingly dubious claims). In discussions with friends I stated that I believe this is because that people are so overwhelmed with information that whereas as a child most people are taught to "Get the facts then draw your conclusion" now there are so many facts that people also want the conclusion presented to them.

I feel that I'm starting to win the war on the information now. I'm a lot more selective about what I regularly read and once again the concepts behind open source are leading the fight. Enter reddit and other sites like it. Basically these are sites which users submit links to articles and things of interest that are then rated by all the other users / readers of the site. The higher the rating the higher up the list the article goes so that what you end up with is a self regulated filter of all the interesting things that appear on the net in a given day and the most amazing part about it is that it works. I've had more interesting articles and links of note from reddit in the few weeks that i've been using it then all the other rss feeds I was subscribed to before.