It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure.

Clay Shirky gave a great speech at the recent Web 2.0 Expo which contains a wealth of insightful thoughts about our modern problems of managing information. He says that the issue is not information overload, it’s the failure of filtering systems. Shirky believes that information overload has been around since the invention of the printing press, and it’s nothing really new. What is the issue, is in the forms and flows that information is now taking. When information is coming and going at and from you from so many different directions, the social systems and filters that used to manage the flows breakdown from stress. He says we need to re-think a lot of things, including social norms, to understand and deal with all the new ways of living technology has provided.