Clay Shirky teaches at the Interactive Telecommunications program at New York University and is the author, most recently, of Here Comes Everybody, about how new means of communication are changing the social environment. CJR’s Russ Juskalian recently spoke with Shirky about knowledge, the Internet, and why we shouldn’t worry about information overload. The second part of the interview can be found here.
Russ Juskalian: Could you do an overview of how literary reading gave way to television, and, then, to the Web? I read your response to Nick Carr’s Atlantic article—I was wondering if you could talk about that for a little bit.
CS: One of the things that I’ve noticed with criticisms of the Internet is that very often they’re displaced criticisms of television. That there are a lot of people, Nick Carr especially is a recent addition to the canon, wringing their hands over the end of literary reading. And they’re laying that at the foot of the Internet. It seems to me, in fact, from the historical record, that the idea of literary reading as a sort of broad and normal activity was done in by television, and it was done in forty years ago.
The funny thing, though, is when television came along, it became, to a degree literally unprecedented in the history of media—not just the dominant media compared to other media, but really the dominant activity in life outside of sleeping and working—that a curious bargain was struck where television still genuflected to the idea of literary reading. The notion was that there was somehow this sacred cathedral of the great books and so forth. It was just that no one actually participated in it, and so it was sort of this kind of Potemkin village. What the Internet has actually done is not decimate literary reading; that was really a done deal by 1970. What it has done, instead, is brought back reading and writing as a normal activity for a huge group of people.
Many, many more people are reading and writing now as part of their daily experience. But, because the reading and writing has come back without bringing Tolstoy along with it, the enormity of the historical loss to the literary landscape caused by television is now becoming manifested to everybody. And I think as people are surveying the Internet, a lot of what they’re doing is just shooting the messenger.
RJ: So what do you think this has done to patterns of media consumption in recent years?
CS: Patterns of media consumption in recent years are very complicated to study, in part because we have a hard time right now separating fads from cohort effects from real deep structural shifts. So, when Friendster came along in 2002 and became this incredibly popular, fast-growing application, and everybody said “Oh, you know, Friendster’s invented this new category of the social networking service”—and then it went away. By, you know, 2005, Friendster was basically a dead letter. MySpace had become the new application, right. Everybody then says “Oh, it’s MySpace….” Then Facebook comes along and has the incredible success it’s had. And so we have a very difficult time looking at the media landscape today, sorting the deep effects from the shallow ones. Many of the effects that people are thinking about today are, in fact, shallow effects.
But, the deep effects seem to me to be that when people are given media that isn’t interactive, they invent their own interactions around it. You will see this around television shows. Lost and Heroes are probably the most famous in this mode where the enormity of fan activity around the show is vastly larger than it was around equivalently popular shows in the ’90s, much less ‘87, as its era. And so, where the creators of media aren’t adding interactive effects, users are stepping in on their own, right?
The growth and spread of fan fiction is a way for the fans to participate directly in, say, the Harry Potter universe or the Tolkien universe. You see something that wasn’t possible even ten years ago, both because the technologies are in place but also, much more importantly, because now these tools reach most of society. Right, it’s not just when a tool comes along that change happens. It’s really when it becomes ubiquitous and even boring. And what’s happened now is that the Web has gotten boring for a whole generation of teens and twenty-somethings. And so, because they can take it for granted, they’re using this platform to add interactivity around regular media consumption.
RJ: Do you see a shift going on in terms of attention or attention span? Are people bouncing around between these things—you know, they watch the show and they want to blog about it and then they want to be part of the community? Or are all the complaints about attention span just kind of wild?
CS: You know, there’ve always been these complaints about attention span. And, again, this is one of the things that’s—people just worry about attention span and they change the media they worry about. I mean, when I was growing up, the attention span worry was, you know, entirely targeted at television shows and so forth. And, one of the things I think Steven Johnson does quite beautifully in Everything Bad is Good for You is to note the ways in which the unit of a television show moved from being inside the show—you have Fantasy Island or Love Boat, which has sort of two or three subplots—to being units of comprehension that passed across several shows. So, you get the Sopranos, where the entire thing has a narrative arc that spans years. So, it’s harder, I think, to make the case that attention span is unilaterally shortening.
What is quite obviously happening is that the number of things that are available for short attention are increasing. But, so is the ability to consume complicated, long-form information. I think the fact that Nate Silver’s site in the recent election—Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com—became a breakout hit was a kind of a testimony to a hunger in people for taking in information in long, large, complex ways. It was just a crazy amount of information that Silver followed. One of the things the Internet does by removing the old constraints—it’s really the first thing ever invented worthy of the name media, because it’s the first general purpose media we’ve ever had—is it almost never moves us from a world of one effect to another effect. It almost always increases the range of all effects. So, I think that, you know, it’s certainly been a boon for, you know, short-form blogging and Twittering and so forth. But, it also means that someone who’s especially interested in a certain kind of content can actually get much, much more access to it than possible.
So, I think it has increased long attention span where that is what people find rewarding and increased short attention span where that’s been found rewarding. My seven-year-old, who is absolutely obsessed with every aspect of the New York transportation system, has found on Wikipedia more information than his parents who have lived in New York for twenty and forty years, respectively, could possibly have provided him. And, he’s just happy to be on Wikipedia, pulling this information down and adding it up. And there’s so much reward there for long attention spans and I think we haven’t noticed it in part because the narrative that we tell ourselves about media is ‘the past is always better than the future,’ that we kind of missed the fact that, actually, the range of effects is opening up.
RJ: Would you say that the main effect of the Internet or the Web on media consumption is that it has facilitated a wider range of accessibility from the really short-term to the really long-term to the really in-depth—
CS: Yeah, absolutely. Everyone who’s dealt with publishing constraints—who has the experience of knowing “Oh, I’m sorry, this is a 10,000 word article we’ve commissioned, or a 5,000 word article, and we’re going to get rid of all this extra writing stuff”—has seen places where long-form writing, because there’s no bottom of the page, where long-form writing can thrive. One of the most important essays ever published in the technology world was The Cathedrals and the Bazaar, Eric Raymond’s long-form musing on open-source software and how it works. That thing comes in, at I think, 20,000 words. If that had been sent through The New York Times Magazine’s editorial process, it would have been slashed to ribbons. And yet it changed the world.
But we don’t tell stories about long-form writing that couldn’t have thrived in the existing constraints of print media because print media squishes things down to be too short because it doesn’t match this narrative that was first set up for TV, which is “Oh, all this new media is shortening people’s attention spans and distracting them.” To which you can, you know, you can only reply, “Yes, that’s true,” except where it’s not true. There’s no inkling of that of that explanation in the success of, say, The Cathedral and the Bazaar. And the length of that essay was, in part, of one of things that made it successful.
RJ: Why do so many people seem focused on this idea that the Web has cut our attention spans down? What’s responsible for that phenomenon?
CS: So many people think that the Web is shortening attention spans?
RJ: Yeah.
CS: You know, “Life was better when I was younger” is always an acceptable narrative. Right? And so for anybody who was brought up genuflecting to the literary culture and the virtues of reading Tolstoy—and essentially Tolstoy is a trope in these things, War and Peace is the longest novel in the sort of Euro-centric canon—you could always make the argument that the present is worse than the past by simply pointing to the virtues of the past. And so, what the Web does is that it does what all amateur increases do, which is it decreases the average quality of what’s available. It is exactly, precisely, the complaint made about the printing press. So, the only thing surprising about the Web, in a way, is that it’s been a long time since we’ve had a medium that increased the amount of production of written material this dramatically.
But people made the same complaint about comic books, they made the same complaint about paperbacks, and they made the same complaint about the vulgarity of the printing press. Whenever you let more people in, things get vulgar by definition. And people who benefited under the old system or who dislike or distrust vulgarity as a process always have room to complain. But, the interesting thing is, when you say so many people believe this, in fact almost no one believes this, right? There’s a tiny, tiny slice of the chattering classes for whom “Life was better when I was younger” is an acceptable complaint to make, and they have these little conferences or whatever and agree with one another about that phenomenon. But when you look at the actual use of the Web, it is through the roof. And it has continued in an unbroken growth from the early ’90s until now. So, in fact, almost everybody thinks it’s a good idea because they’re embracing it and they’re experimenting with it and they don’t really care what we think.
And when I say “we,” I mean—I am a member of the Chardonnay-swilling East Coast liberal media elite. But I also recognize that anything I might have to say about the utility of the media actually isn’t going to influence whether or not people are going to adopt this. And so once you get out of the idea that basically the previous avatars of the cultural good, and the world that George W.S. Trow chronicled so beautifully Within the Context of No Context—once you grasp that those people are powerless to that effect, powerless with regard to the adoption curve—the question really becomes, “How do you point out an effect where something has been damaged?” And that’s where I think a lot of this conversation about reading breaks down, because if you assume that reading Tolstoy is an a priori good, your world crumbled in 1970. And it’s hard to point to the Web as responsible for any of that because that was a done deal for some time.
If you want to point to more proximate harms, it would be very hard to argue, for example, that innovation, inventiveness, new intellectual discoveries had slowed as a result of the Internet, and so people are left with these kind of mealy-mouth cultural critiques, because nostalgia becomes the only bulwark against change. The actual effects of making more information available to more people have been enormously beneficial to society, yet not to the intellectual gatekeepers in the generation in which that change happened.
RJ: I recently talked to an author who was afraid that we’re slipping into some kind of contemporary Dark Age. Are we seeing a new Luddism?
CS: Of course there’s a new Luddism! There’s always a new Luddism whenever there’s change. I mean, Luddism is specifically a demand that the people who benefited from the old system be consulted before any technology is allowed to disrupt it. That’s what the Luddites wanted. And they wanted it in the most violent, murderously direct way possible. But, to say, essentially, that the change should be stopped because it’s disrupting previous value is exactly Luddite. I mean, no one is anti-technology in general times, right? The use of Luddism as a description for anti-technology is ridiculous. What Luddites are is anti-change, and, in particular, they are anti-change in a way that discomforts the beneficiaries of the previous system.
So anyone saying, essentially, that this is the Dark Ages is, first of all, you know barking up the wrong tree. If you want to look at intellectual inventiveness as the metric of whether or not a society is using a tool for educational purposes or not, I think it would be very difficult, in the present era, to show that the enormous increase in the speed and totality with which novel information is spread to the people who need it is bad for intellectual life. Almost all the people for whom the casual assumption that the European novel is the height of human achievement are essentially assuming that any change in the status of that particular sort of “great books-ish” analysis of human culture—any challenge to that version of the status quo—is itself evidence of decline.
RJ: What’s your response to people who say that all this information that’s out there, all this knowledge that we’re producing is great, and there’s all this access that we didn’t have before. But we also risk information overload alongside, and we don’t—
CS: Oh, those are the stupidest people in the entire debate because they, I mean, almost all of the people arguing that this is the Dark Ages are narcissists, because they’re essentially trying to preserve a particular piece of it. But the information overload people are the most narcissistic because information overload started in Alexandria, in the library of Alexandria, right? That was the first example where we have concrete archaeological evidence that there was more information in one place than one human being could deal with in one lifetime, which is almost the definition of information overload. And the first deep attempt to categorize knowledge so that you could subset; the first take on the information filtering problem appears in the library of Alexandria.
By the time that the publishing industries spun up in Venice in the early- to mid-1500s, the ability to have access to more reading material than you could finish in a lifetime is now starting to become a general problem of the educated classes. And by the 1800s, it’s a general problem of the middle class. So there is no such thing as information overload, there’s only filter failure, right? Which is to say the normal case of modern life is information overload for all educated members of society.
If you took the contents of an average Barnes and Noble, and you dumped it into the streets and said to someone, “You know what’s in there? There’s some works of Auden in there, there’s some Plato in there. Wade on in and you’ll find what you like.” And if you wade on in, you know what you’d get? You’d get Chicken Soup for the Soul. Or, you’d get Love’s Tender Fear. You’d get all this junk. The reason we think that there’s not an information overload problem in a Barnes and Noble or a library is that we’re actually used to the cataloging system. On the Web, we’re just not used to the filters yet, and so it seems like “Oh, there’s so much more information.” But, in fact, from the 1500s on, that’s been the normal case.
So, the real question is, how do we design filters that let us find our way through this particular abundance of information? And, you know, my answer to that question has been: the only group that can catalog everything is everybody. One of the reasons you see this enormous move towards social filters, as with Digg, as with del.icio.us, as with Google Reader, in a way, is simply that the scale of the problem has exceeded what professional catalogers can do. But, you know, you never hear twenty-year-olds talking about information overload because they understand the filters they’re given. You only hear, you know, forty- and fifty-year-olds taking about it, sixty-year-olds talking about because we grew up in the world of card catalogs and TV Guide. And now, all the filters we’re used to are broken and we’d like to blame it on the environment instead of admitting that we’re just, you know, we just don’t understand what’s going on.
RJ: So, is this just a generational thing? That younger people have come up using these filters and these technologies and they love it and the older generation is just kind of scared?
CS: Yeah, that’s certainly part of it. I mean, the thing that people say about young people is just that they understand the technology so well. Well, I teach in a graduate program, I see twenty-five-year-olds all the time. They actually don’t understand the technology particularly well. I think I understand quite a lot of it quite a bit better than they do, which is the reason why I’m teaching there and they’re students. The advantage they have over me is that they don’t have to unlearn anything. They don’t have to unlearn the idea that a card catalog is a helpful thing to have. That you need a librarian to find things. That you have to figure out where you’re looking before you what you’re looking for. None of those things are true anymore. And so one of the problems that old people like me suffer from is just we know too many solutions for problems that no longer exist. And it kind of freaks us out to realize that all the things we mastered don’t really add up to much value anymore.
It’s not so much that young people are smart and old people are scared. It’s that young people don’t have to unlearn all the stuff that old people do have to unlearn if we want to understand this world. And unlearning is just about the least fun activity in the world. So, you know, it’s easy to understand why people don’t want to sign up for it. But it’s also kind of pathetic that the people going around talking about information overload don’t stop to factor in the idea that if the twenty-year-olds aren’t complaining about information overload, it probably isn’t the problem we think it is.
RJ: It almost sounds like the framework that you’re providing for this is one of existential angst among these older people who have lost their footing, or their ground in the ..
CS: I mean, we’ll be dead and then it won’t matter.
RJ: That’s great.
CS: I mean, really, I’m just so impatient with the argument that the world should be slowed down to help people who aren’t smart enough to understand what’s going on. It’s in part because I grew up in a generation that benefited enormously from not doing that. Right? The baby boomers, when we were young, we had zero, zero patience for the idea that people who are in their fifties in the ’70s and ’80s should somehow be shielded from cultural changes because somehow the stuff that we were doing was upsetting them. So, now it’s our turn and we ought to just suck it up.
This article is part of the online supplement to the November/December print issue of the Columbia Journalism Review. To read that issue’s cover story, entitled “Overload!: Journalism’s battle for relevance in an age of too much information”, click here. The second half of Russ Juskalian’s interview with Clay Shirky will run on Monday, December 23rd.
Clay, you are one of the smartest thinkers on the web right now. I just taught a class on blogging and social media at the Academy of Art University and you are dead right, 20 somethings are not up to speed on technology at all. Right now I work for a pretty big enterprise and I think one of the biggest opportunities right now is helping big organizations adopt some of the practices that are creating the most value on the web. Unfortunately enterprises are also distracted by the noise of social networks etc. and the next bright shiny noisy object, and it is obscuring the really powerful ways to create value on the web and capitalize on this cognitive surplus.
I'm currently writing a blog post called "The future of business is to create products and services that people can believe in & provide ways for people to take responsibility help" and will be posting to http://experiencecurve.com soon :-)
Posted by Karl Long on Fri 19 Dec 2008 at 05:28 PM
Awesome interview. I cannot wait for round 2!
-Robert
Founder Metaprinter.com
Posted by Robert Ivan on Fri 19 Dec 2008 at 08:48 PM
Excellent interview. I do have a quibble though, on the subject of information overload. Certainly the view that you demolish in the interview is the cranky, un-reflective one that argues that something is valuable only because it is rare, and thus somehow that knowledge has become almost banal in its ubiquity it is devalued. It was just to dismiss that view for basically the reasons you assigned. However, this is not the only problem that large quantities of information can cause.
To utilize the Library at Alexandria example for a second, the more pertinent problem of information overload has to do with how it is arranged and structured. Imagine a library which has no card catalog and is so vast that it is nearly impossible to find the text that answers your inquiry in any reasonable amount of time. Current technical solutions to this problem online, such as Google and other search engines, are metaphorically equivalent to hiring some folks, and handing them each a slip of paper with some words that you think might be in the title of the text, and then sending them throughout the library hoping that one of them will happen upon it. As the sheer quantity of information increases, more texts unrelated to the goal of the inquiry will be found given the same search parameters.
Posted by Elemenope on Sat 20 Dec 2008 at 06:03 PM
Excellent interview. I do have a quibble though, on the subject of information overload. Certainly the view that you demolish in the interview is the cranky, un-reflective one that argues that something is valuable only because it is rare, and thus somehow that knowledge has become almost banal in its ubiquity it is devalued. It was just to dismiss that view for basically the reasons you assigned. However, this is not the only problem that large quantities of information can cause.
To utilize the Library at Alexandria example for a second, the more pertinent problem of information overload has to do with how it is arranged and structured. Imagine a library which has no card catalog and is so vast that it is nearly impossible to find the text that answers your inquiry in any reasonable amount of time. Current technical solutions to this problem online, such as Google and other search engines, are metaphorically equivalent to hiring some folks, and handing them each a slip of paper with some words that you think might be in the title of the text, and then sending them throughout the library hoping that one of them will happen upon it. They each bring back a stack of texts that might have what you are looking for, and then it is left to you to sort through the resulting piles. As the sheer quantity of information increases, more texts unrelated to the goal of the inquiry will be found given the same search parameters. Soon, the piles would become unmanageable.
Since it is primarily a technical problem with the overall structure of the information ecology, it really does not indicate any normative judgment the way that so-called Luddites and other nay-sayers would like it to. Still, the problem is food for thought because, absent a breakthrough, the increasing failure of existing tools to find information online, the Internet stands to become a great deal less useful than we are used to it being.
Posted by Elemenope on Sat 20 Dec 2008 at 06:07 PM
Suffice it to say, if you provide a blank wall and marker pens, people will scribble. What's written will reflect the reader's visceral response.
At least Monty Python had it right in the film Life of Brian when the centurion forced Brian to write in Latin "Romans go home" after a brutal course in grammar. Still, all Brian did was to write it 100 times correctly but without providing any insight.
Posted by sylvie chen on Sat 20 Dec 2008 at 08:50 PM
Jesus Christos!...this is one of the most wonderfully written, articulate, entertaining post on a serious subject I've read in my lifetime...thank you so much for a wonderful read Clay...I'll send it to all my friends...Carl Muecke
Posted by wagonjak on Sat 20 Dec 2008 at 09:02 PM
A wonderful interview. I hope the second part takes up the question of how information is--or is not--vetted.
Posted by Eric L. on Sun 21 Dec 2008 at 01:25 PM
Clay: a filtering/sifting/organizing technology to watch is being developed at Fluidinfo.com. Check out Scoble's video interview with the founder.
Posted by Mayson Lancaster on Sun 21 Dec 2008 at 05:53 PM
How fascinating. I never thought of it in these terms before, but I so agree - I spend a lot of time reading and writing on the web. I read newspaper articles online, I read about thirty blogs: great, intelligent, thought out blogs. I'm writing daily on my own blog, and commenting on others.
And why shouldn't we have information overload? Why shouldn't we dive in, use our resources, learn more, do more?
Posted by Lindsay Price on Mon 22 Dec 2008 at 09:47 AM
Clay, I have to say the more I watch you speak, and read your interviews etc, the more I regret having passed on attending NYU's ITP program. However, I'm very happy where I am now and to have stumbled on your insights.
As a marketer, the speed at which many people in our industry move doesn't allow them to understand to take a step back and think about interactive the way you have outlined above.
Also I think there's a big tendency to over-think, over-engineer in a world where that doesn't often matter and many of the generation you describe are unfamiliar.
Posted by Akash on Mon 22 Dec 2008 at 03:36 PM
Clay, thanks for your insights..and as always, brilliant. On the subject of 20somethings and their non-understanding of technologies...the interesting thing here however is that while the average 20something may not understand the technologies themselves (indeed, most friends outside of my industry have no idea what this "data portability" is that I continuously blog about), they do not need to.
Knowledge of a technology and adoption of it are very different things-- knowledge here being more than awareness or even an understanding of usability. And more than anything, their behaviors and mass adoption of normal activities such as "Facebooking" are more or less indicative of the value in abstraction of technology-- that I can have a somewhat native understanding of how a social networking site works, regardless of which particular site it is (or previous usage of it) is a particular, generational knowledge that does divide baby boomers from 20somethings.
True, we don't have to "unlearn" previous behaviors or associations, but that is not our only advantage. We also already have intuitive understanding around the usability of these technologies, if not technical understanding.
Just, for example, in the OpenID debate, some are proponents of creating a brand identity and marketing around OpenID, while design and usability experts argue that "OpenID will only be useful when no one knows what it is."
Cheers!
@alisamleo
Posted by alisa leonard-hansen on Tue 23 Dec 2008 at 03:17 AM
I'm not sure the historical record would stand foursquare behind Mr. Shirky's claims about the changes in literacy. Take Jonathan Rose's magisterial "Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes" and you'll find broad participation in the sacred cathedral of great books among the working classes in the 19th and 20th centuries. Television certainly displaced that, but it wasn't the only cultural factor - anti-bourgeois theorizing about intrinsic working class "culture" among the left, various assaults on meritiocratic education also by the left, and legacies of general anti-educational sentiment (among the religious right in the American South) also played a significant role.
But all the various surveys of literacy undertaken in the U.S. (and also reflected elsewhere in the English-speaking world) point towards not just systematic sub-literacy (93 million Americans with basic or below basic literacy skills) but accelerating a-literacy, which is to say - the ability to read but the decision not to - and diminishing information skills. And the inescapable correlation is that this is a product of the rise of the internet. This can only be one of several factors, but the recent research by UCL for the British Library on how those born after 1993 search for information online shows that the digital divide is really a literacy divide - and that children without old-world literacy skills are largely lost on the information superhighway.
When you combine this with eye-tracking studies, and how people with poor literacy skills navigate through information on the Internet, the idea that it "has brought back reading and writing as a normal activity for a huge group of people" is unconvincing.Perhaps for the 13 million Americans who are proficient in literacy, it has provided more convenient ways of doing certain things. But for the majority it would seem to be a false good/god - something that is flattening and narrowing the experience of reading and reflection.
A short post like this can only sketch out the avenues of criticism and reflection that lead from Mr. Shirky's interview. And it is unfair to be too critical to someone being interviewed. But George Trow is not a substitute for serious research - and that, ironically, seems to be a recurring trope among those new media avatars who pronounce on the cultural and pedagogical impact of the Internet: informationally, it's wiki thin.
Posted by Trevor Butterworth on Tue 23 Dec 2008 at 07:53 AM
I'm not sure the historical record would stand foursquare behind Mr. Shirky's claims about the changes in literacy. Take Jonathan Rose's magisterial "Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes" and you'll find broad participation in the sacred cathedral of great books among the working classes in the 19th and 20th centuries. Television certainly displaced that, but it wasn't the only cultural factor - anti-bourgeois theorizing about intrinsic working class "culture" among the left, various assaults on meritiocratic education also by the left, and legacies of general anti-educational sentiment (among the religious right in the American South) also played a significant role.
But all the various surveys of literacy undertaken in the U.S. (and also reflected elsewhere in the English-speaking world) point towards not just systematic sub-literacy (93 million Americans with basic or below basic literacy skills) but accelerating a-literacy, which is to say - the ability to read but the decision not to - and diminishing information skills. And the inescapable correlation is that this is a product of the rise of the internet. This can only be one of several factors, but the recent research by UCL for the British Library on how those born after 1993 search for information online shows that the digital divide is really a literacy divide - and that children without old-world literacy skills are largely lost on the information superhighway.
When you combine this with eye-tracking studies, and how people with poor literacy skills navigate through information on the Internet, the idea that it "has brought back reading and writing as a normal activity for a huge group of people" is unconvincing.Perhaps for the 13 million Americans who are proficient in literacy, it has provided more convenient ways of doing certain things. But for the majority it would seem to be a false good/god - something that is flattening and narrowing the experience of reading and reflection.
A short post like this can only sketch out the avenues of criticism and reflection that lead from Mr. Shirky's interview. And it is unfair to be too critical to someone being interviewed. But George Trow is not a substitute for serious research - and that, ironically, seems to be a recurring trope among those new media avatars who pronounce on the cultural and pedagogical impact of the Internet: informationally, it's wiki thin.
Posted by Trevor Butterworth on Tue 23 Dec 2008 at 07:55 AM
As a non-fiction author living in a "remote" location, the internet is my best friend.
Posted by Katherine Gordon on Tue 23 Dec 2008 at 10:11 AM
"It's not so much that young people are smart and old people are scared. It's that young people don't have to unlearn all the stuff that old people do have to unlearn if we want to understand this world. And unlearning is just about the least fun activity in the world. So, you know, it's easy to understand why people don't want to sign up for it. But it's also kind of pathetic that the people going around talking about information overload don't stop to factor in the idea that if the twenty-year-olds aren't complaining about information overload, it probably isn't the problem we think it is."
Sorry but old people don't have to unlearn anything unless someone changes the rules then both old and young are the same if the rules are changed too often.
Posted by Bob McGowan on Tue 23 Dec 2008 at 08:18 PM
@Mayson @Clay
Hi Mason
Thanks for the pointer/plug! :-)
I met with Clay in 2008 at NYU. I didn't show him a demo but we had a pretty good talk.
Terry
Posted by Terry Jones on Fri 2 Jan 2009 at 07:24 AM
It seems a bit too clever to point out the library of Alexandria, claim that it contained way too much to read, and conclude that information overload has been old news for millennia.
Couldn't the reasons most twentysomethings don't complain of information overload have something to do with their unfamiliarity with the quiet, reflective, or simply well-organized or -filtered alternative?
Posted by Josh Young on Fri 2 Jan 2009 at 04:51 PM
I think that information overload can also largely be understood as a psychological problem, in addition to a problem with technology's filters needing to catch up. I still get anxious sometimes at the sheer number of quality books in the universe, and the fact that—as a human being with a finite lifespan—I will never read all of the ones that I want to read. The problem grows exponentially larger with all the new Quality Content that's now available online. But at a personal level, it's a real problem.
I also wrote a short essay on Clay's observations on information overload, and how they tie in to David Allen's Getting Things Done.
Posted by Chris Colón on Mon 5 Jan 2009 at 12:23 PM
Excellent interview, but I would argue that literary reading is alive and well. Tolstoy is a bestseller these days thanks to Oprah. The human craving for story remains intact and intense.
Posted by Jean on Mon 5 Jan 2009 at 07:13 PM
I have revisited this blog to follow the response trail.
Needless to say, not much was added except from Trevor Butterworth.
Reflecting on the past few months I would like to add one observation:
The inevitable creep from word to moving image as a means of expression.
Traffic on Youtube has now surpassed traffic (visits plus time on site) ont he top 10 web sites (including CNN).
What this predicts is a future of a non-word enabled society. Communication will be verbal with appropriate speech to text converters plus hyperlinks and tags to web enabled video media. One good thing - the camera will face both ways.
No need to burn books, the termites will do the job for you.
Posted by sylviechen on Tue 24 Mar 2009 at 11:52 PM
Thank you for this fascinating interview, which I found through a blog post by Jay Rosen, after reading one of his tweets. I do have to agree with Chris Colón's comment though that it's not simply a challenge of implementing innovative filtering. Absolutely this is a significant part of it. However, in a similar fashion to many people I know, I find information through the new media channels extremely quickly, granted many who are less technically savvy don't, which IS a filtering problem.
New media showers you with endless connects to more content, and some people have better filtering abilities than others, and better screening abilities to choose their preferred (or higher quality) content. So it's really a paradox of choice, and a matter of having self discipline perhaps. This is rather different than say, when in a library or book store where you may pickup several books on a subject to skim through.
Posted by Justin JDOG Marks on Sat 7 Nov 2009 at 06:19 AM
Clay, your comments about television are spot on. There has been no greater contributor to the decline in literary activities - ever.
As far as attention span goes - yes, I think we are a society of spastics that can't focus - EXCEPT - it's fairly amazing how long TV and movies can keep some people glued. No, it's really not an attention problem, it's an interest problem.
David Maynard
Posted by David Maynard on Thu 2 Jun 2011 at 03:03 PM
i agree
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