“If you let anyone create any information there will be so much information that there is no way we can keep track of it all.” We hear this all the time.
Answer: Intuitively it sounds right but is flawed because information overload is already a fundamental feature of nature.
Experiment: Stop what you are doing. What do you hear? What do you see? What is your body feeling? Notice what is happening around you. Is there any movement? What about extemporaneous background sounds? Did you hear and see those things only a few moments ago? Sure you did, but did you notice them? Certainly not all of them, if any of them at all.
Why? Focus and filters. When we read a book we usually focus on the book. This creates a natural filter where only the words from the pages come through. They are so alive that they give us meaning and they tie up our brains, dropping all other senses.
In a similar manner, we too must focus and filter. In 2008, Clay Shirky gave a speech at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York City entitled, “It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure.“ In it he says, “We are to information overload as fish are to water. It’s just what we swim in. Itz Acrobean, a man who would know once said, ‘If you have the same problem for a long time, maybe it’s not a problem. Maybe it’s a fact…’ What’s changing now is the filters we have used (over the last 500 years) are breaking.” He goes on to say that the solution won’t come from tweaking the old filters, but in creating new ones.
The goal has never been to “keep track of it all.” Ever since you were born, filters have kicked in and you had to focus to make sense of the world. We purposefully, then and now, have let information pass us by and rarely are we the worse for it. Nothing has changed. To make sense of the barrage of information which we allow to confront us every day, we must have personal filters and a deliberate focus. We become overwhelmed when either the filters fail or become lax or if we lose our focus.
Yet with the way in which we need to filter has changed. The six o’clock news filtered stories and gave us what they wanted us to hear. The newspapers had the same model. So did your mother. Now, there is not a lot of information that is not freely available to us. Instead of the filter on the front end – before the information gets to us – we must learn how to expand our innate subconscious filter to include a deliberate prefilter. Because this is a conscience effort, and we are humans, the filter can be fickle. That is where our focus, our self-discipline, must come into play. We must focus on constantly reevaluating and retuning our filters and taking in their product. And there is a fine line between reevaluation and absorbing the filtered information.
If we spend too much time reevaluating the filters, the beneficial information will pass us by. Yet too much time spent on only consuming the products of our filters will trap us in a narrow world which is constantly changing.
This balance is an art. In trying to gain the right balance we will fall off to one side or another. Suddenly the pain of too much jolts us back. For example, too much evaluating what to filter and what not to filter eventually leads us to frustration as information overload. And the opposite is true. Relying too much on our set filters, we might see a link to a new source of information that should be added to our filter, throwing us into a reevaluation mode. Thy cycle is never ending.
So instead of throwing our hands in the air and saying we suffer from information overload, we must learn to dynamically adjust our filters and focus. This takes self-discipline and experience.
We must learn to expand our innate and natural filters and focus to accommodate this onslaught of information. How do we help others do this? We let them fail and we help them focus. With the sense of purpose that comes with focus, filters will be more natural. We should help lead them to this.
Allow them to decide what is important to them. This was a fundamental flaw of corporate knowledge management. KM tried to filter and focus for us, thus creating an unnatural delivery and flow of information, as well as the interaction with the information. If we take the stance that we are all in charge of our personal knowledge management (PKM), the corporate KM becomes an aggregate of our PKMs instead of an imposed structure. The last #KMers tweetchat on PKMs was fascinating. Check it out.
The matter of information overload comes back to supply and trust. Give others the tools and knowledge to succeed and they will surprise you.
