Knowledge, the Internet, and Information Overload

Internet VS. Books Criticism: The Internet has killed literary reading! Shirky: “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…What the Internet has actually done is not decimate literary reading; that was really a done deal by 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.” What are Shirky’s claims here? Do you agree? How does his approach to new media differ from Rosen’s?

The Problem of Attention Criticism: Young people can’t concentrate! (Because they don’t read Dickens!) Shirky: “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…. 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…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. Do you agree that both forms of attention are evolving? What do you think about the story we tell ourselves about media? Has this narrative been expressed in any of the readings or discussion in this class?

Information Overload Criticism: The internet is causing information overload! Shirky: “Oh, those are the stupidest people in the entire debate…. 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….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.” Do you agree that “information overload” has been a problem since Gutenberg? What filters do you use to help filter/manage information?

Young VS Old Criticism: It’s a generational thing (“younger people have come up using these filters and these technologies and they love it and the older generation is just kind of scared”). Shirky: “The thing that people say about young people is just that they understand the technology so well.…They actually don’t understand the technology particularly well….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.” Do you agree with Shirky’s assessment of the generational divide? Do you agree with his description of the research process? (I.e. depending on librarians, knowing where to look)

The Future of Journalism What will happen to the news? Shirky: “what’s going to happen is, basically, the number of people who commit acts of journalism will rise enormously and the number of people who derive most, or all, of their income from acts of journalism is going to shrink. It’s just what happened to photographers with the spread of cameras. There’s just many, many, many, many more photos than there used to be. But it’s harder to make your living just by owning a nice camera and setting up in town and taking pictures of people’s kids…And I think journalism is essentially next in line to see that change, to go through that change…The average quality of something written is going to fall to the floor because of the volume of written material. But the competition will mean that the premium for having something especially interesting is going to rise. And then, over the course of the next ten years, we’ll sort ourselves out into some sort of new equilibrium.” What *is* the role of the journalist in today’s society? Where do you get *your* news? Have you ever committed “acts of journalism?”

The End