A New Perspective On Information Overload: Information as Matter

Information and user-experience theorist Thomas Peterson has proposed some fascinating ideas on how to deal with the overwhelming amount of data in the world and our limited capacity to consume it.

Peterson illustrates our current bottleneck model and describes its inherent inefficiencies, pointing to the idea that we need an entirely new way to look at information. Peterson does not claim to know what this will look like yet, but suggests that perhaps we will consume data like we do words and sentences. He explains how we don’t read by consciously processing each individual letter, so perhaps we will develop a model that is not built around individual items in feed readers. “Information as Matter’ proposes a way of approaching information in a more holistic way, similar to how we would see physical objects instead of a collection of atoms.

[via Black & White]