Web 2.0 Expo 7 - Filters and Information Overload

OK – I am attending a lot of presentations today at the Web 2.0 Expo, so I will try to shorten down my summaries a bit in order to squeeze them all in…

Clay Shirky – the author of “Here Comes Everybody” – gave a quick keynote presentation, which was about information overload and the filtering of information.

Basically his point was that information overload as a phenomenon has been around since the days of the Gutenberg press, where we encountered a world containing more information than any single human can absorb in a lifetime.

What has changed with the Internet is therefore not information overload, but rather the economics of information overload.

In the pre-internet age publishers of information – be it print, audio or video – had to take a risk when choosing to publish a book, print a newspaper or run a television program. This risk was related to the fact that it was fairly expensive to be a publisher.

This has changed today where the costs of publishing are approaching zero. Today we can relatively risk-free publish anything we like. This means that filtering of good and bad content has moved from being a pre-publishing event to a post-publishing event.

So we are still experiencing information overload, but in stead of having publishers filter our information, we now have number of other services that do the filtering for us. This is services like Google, Spam filters and everything else which helps us sift the relevant from the irrelevant.

It was not super clear exactly what Shirky wished to communicate, but basically his point was that the challenge today is not information overload – the challenge today is to constantly design and re-design filters that can help us navigate in a post-publishing information overload world.