Dealing with information overload
The greatest challenge that new technologies have brought on to us is probably information overload. So many news sites, tv channels, papers, opinions to read and so much information being churned out constantly makes it a mammoth task to try to stay on top of everything. You simply can’t. I use Google Reader and remember how a year ago I spent at least one hour daily, screening through the thousands of feeds I had, tagging interesting articles, then trying to read all of them in a day. If that is your main task then you can probably space it out through a day, but if you have many other things to do then it can quickly drive you crazy. Just like Sisyphus condemned to push a rock up a mountain endlessly, you are condemned to every day sift through thousands of new stories, many of them that are repeated.
So how can we make sure that we control information and that it’s not the other way around? It’s probably just a case of being very selective as to what sources you choose to follow and make sure to constantly filter out those that are irrelevant. But that in itself can also be hard work.
Back in their November/December issue, the Columbia Journalism Review had a great article just on information overload. The piece itself is a long but excellent read which explains how we live in an age of extreme consumption, where we always want more and at a faster rate every time. But we also have to accept the limits of human attention, and know that the more information we process the less useful and in depth it risk being. Instead of taking the time to analyze and think over information we have retaught ourselves to just go through and pick news. Where we have greatly improved in sifting through great loads of feeds we have lost out in the ability to synthetize and develop.
It’s surprising how news outlets still aim to create more and more news, obviously because of the need to have enough page views so that online ads become profitable, when they should focus much more on quality and originality. We are seeing new sites pop up though that aim to offer this sort of information such as Global Post or Spot.us. Some news companies also aim to adapt journalists to their new role of interpreting stories and putting them in context for readers. The AP for example has instituted the “1-2-3 filing system” to eliminate redundancy and confusion in the news room. El Pais recently merged its digital and paper newsrooms. While this will mean more work for the same pay for journalists, it also implies a more fluid news process.
