Too Much Information

I’ve argued before that “too much information” is rarely the problem–if you know enough to create problems, you usually also know enough to solve them. But there will be growing pains in the interim, and that is the focus of recent interviews with Faith Popcorn and Howard Rheingold.

Rheingold, always the first to recognize socio-technological trends, points out in a Guardian interview that we’ve entered a state in which we cannot remember everything that passes through our minds. He compares this to Plato’s Phaedrus, which cautions that if we write our knowledge down in “these dead things called books using this new alphabet, then we won’t remember things the way we used to.”

We can’t expect to have complete command of all our knowledge–in fact, it has been suggested that what separates the truly successful from the normal is the ability to block out extraneous information and concentrate fully on one thing. But it is good to pay attention to what we are losing when we embrace the information explosion.

Faith Popcorn talks about the future of the office, saying that employers will increasingly monitor their workers’ health, productivity, and happiness in order to keep them working efficiently. She brushes aside concerns about loss of privacy, saying that “people will get over such concerns when they see the tremendous convenience such technologies and services can offer”, much like Rheingold has said before.

Popcorn also predicts that interfaces to computers will fade away; instead of “operating the computer”, the computer will monitor you, and bring you appropriate contextual information while recognizing your often vague personal commands. The central task of humans, meanwhile, will be to create ideas, not products or services.

In the end, Rheingold says that we do need limits to technology; while the scope of information should (and will) continue to expand, its application should be controlled. Voting online is a bad idea, he says (it increases the noise while weakening the signal of a centralized election), as is the lack of social mores online (they will develop eventually). Likewise, the use of advanced technology in places not prepared for it is asking for the growing pains associated with culture lag.