Comments on: Help, We’re Being Digitally Bombarded

By: sometimes sharing is not caring | varnelis.net

sometimes sharing is not caring | varnelis.net — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 17:30:24 +0000

[...] Evans feels digitally inundated today. The massive amount of constantly updated information, particularly from the firehose of data [...]

By: Bookmarks for October 27 to November 10 | FactoryCity

Bookmarks for October 27 to November 10 | FactoryCity — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 08:02:14 +0000

[...] Help, We’re Being Digitally Bombarded | Mark Evans [...]

By: Paul

Paul — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 09:21:26 +0000

Luckily most of the info out there goes away. Just like this post will. There is an 99% chance that the person who maintains the blog will read it, a 50% chance that anyone who reads the article will read it and like a 0.001% chance that anyone else will read it. And every day that passes, the chances diminish. Luckily the web is a great garbage disposal. If a search engine like Google picks up this comment, then I guess it can serve ads for any keywords it may have found, though by the looks of it, there aren’t many. I’ll add some for free: Mark Evans rocks! http://www.markevanstech.com is a great blog. I love Canada. Google me. I use Twitter, but nobody follows me.

By: David

David — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 21:21:23 +0000

Isn’t the problem obvious? We all added dozens (if not hundreds or even thousands) of people who aren’t really our friends.

And now that we’ve created these lists of people who we are following, we’re swamped with info.

The average person does not deal with this. It’s only the techno-elite.

By: Mark

Mark — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 20:55:03 +0000

Too much info is an old problem. See Clay Shirky’s speech at web2.0NY — “It’s not too much information. It’s filter failure.” http://web2expo.blip.tv/file/1277460/

Smart people indeed.

By: Fred Brandenberg

Fred Brandenberg — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 10:59:30 +0000

The late and great Herber Simon wrote, way back in 1971, “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”

I think we are safe until the day that they start trying to stream information into us while we sleep…now that would be a killer app! I’m joking of course. Maybe the Internet will make us all like the Alex of A Clockwork Orange, however no one is binding us to a chair, nor using tootpicks to keep our eyes wide open, we do it willingly. Let’s hope that 90% of our brain they keep telling us is unused really is usable. The one part of the problem that I don’t think anyone can ever solve, is that most of the information, if not 99% of it, is not verifyable and could simply be made up junk. We don’t have time to evaluate all of the pieces of data, so the chance of false information can easily spread like wildfire. That’s probably why spam is such widespread.

Buy Viagra/prozac cocktails cheap on the Internet. Click here now and open the attached word document. In it you will find out how ot make money in a down market, how to make your schlong bigger, and buy a house with no money down.

By: uglychart.com: a blog about stocks » Blog Archive » links for November 9th

Sun, 09 Nov 2008 05:01:42 +0000

[...] Help, We’re Being Digitally Bombarded | Mark Evans – "My read is consumers of digital services and content are being swamped, and madly scrambling to keep up. As a result, I think there’s going to be a growing demand for tools that filter and synthesize things to reduce the amount of noise." – I know I need it badly.technology web [...]

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 04:36:43 +0000

I think the problem is not that we don’t have control of how we allocate our attention, but rather that we haven’t figured out a way to optimize that allocation. I think that’s to be expected of any new media technology, and of course online communication is evolving so rapidly that it’s hard to optimize against a moving target.

Clay Shirky’s recent keynote at Web 2.0 NYC, “It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure,” is sort of on this topic. My commentary (and a link to the video) at http://thenoisychannel.com/2008/09/23/quick-bites-filter-failure-2/

By: George Nimeh

George Nimeh — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 03:00:15 +0000

Nice post.

I think this is all incredibly positive. The fact is, the more we share, the better we will become. But I also think that we need much better and simpler ways to control all this information. Right now, it’s like trying to manage a Sky+ HD box with a Zenith Space Command. Surely, this can be better.

More here, if you’re interested:
http://www.i-boy.com/weblog/2008/11/signal-to-noise-and-zuckerbergs-law.html

~G~

By: Titanas

Titanas — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 22:20:04 +0000

I keep listening the same thing about the noise from people all the time. It’s the fundamental right to express our opinions and repeat as much as we want. There is no noise! It’s like going to news.google.com or techmeme and ask to post articles about Barack’s Obama win only from the NYT and the WSJ because pretty much everybody else say and
comment the same thing and create noise.

It’s how we perceive information and how we consume it. There is no noise. We simply choose to follow or not, read blogs or not, read RSS or not like we do in everyday life with only certain people as friends, certain people as acquaintances, certain people as family etc. In real life we don’t talk about noise and if someone talk too much within a certain group we try to avoid him next time we go out. Instead we want to keep everybody in our twitter cycle and ask the ones we perceive as noisy to change their behavior. We need to master our digital Eg0.