I have an information problem. There are 278 books on my “Want to read list”. There are 1,794 articles saved in my read-later app. There appear to be 2,241 episodes in my podcasts “to listen to” queue. The knowledge of hundreds of pending unread journal articles put me off ever even opening my collection of them to check.
Then on the other side of the equation there’s the collection of hundred of read items I want to blog about, and several half-written posts about a fraction of them.
I’m somewhat ashamed to say I even started a new RSS reader account on the basis that my collection of feeds felt somewhat unmanageable when all in one place. I guess I’m going to have to stop teasing my colleague for starting a new Google mail account because their previous one filled up.
It’s absurd. I’ve only got one lifetime, as far as I know. And it’s not like these numbers don’t grow every single day.
I know I’m not alone in this. Nicholas Carr writes about two forms of information overload, only one of which is solvable by the standard solution of improving the information filters, search and prioritisation algorithms that are available to us.
One can intuitively feel this to be true. We have so many more electronic facilities to aid us in sorting through and finding high quality material than we used to - even whilst acknowledging that some of the more famous ones are perhaps getting worse. But who feels like they have less information overload now than in the past?
In Carr’s view, that’s because these filtering systems only solve “situational overload”
Situational overload is the needle-in-the-haystack problem: You need a particular piece of information — in order to answer a question of one sort or another — and that piece of information is buried in a bunch of other pieces of information.
Many information-sorting technologies, from the introduction of indexes, catalogues and the Dewey Decimal system onwards, have made inroads into this.
But these systems don’t help with “ambient overload”.
Ambient overload doesn’t involve needles in haystacks. It involves haystack-sized piles of needles.
We experience ambient overload when we’re surrounded by so much information that is of immediate interest to us that we feel overwhelmed by the neverending pressure of trying to keep up with it all.
This is exactly right. I’m not confused as to which handful of my 278 to-read books are actually going to be of interest to me. In principle they all are. I hand-selected them. This is a post-filtered list, full of likely needles; full of signal, not obscured by noise.
The world’s best search isn’t going to help me here. In fact, improving the filters we have available to us simply pushes ever-increasing amounts of ever-more interesting content in our direction.
There are people trying to solve this problem, but no solution that I’ve seen feels very satisfying. For example, there are multiple book summarisation services - Blinkist, Shortform and their ilk - which I’ve played with a bit in the past. Whilst they have their uses I don’t find them to be an adequate substitute for the original material. Let alone the modern AI based solutions - either the generic “Please, chatbot, summarise this book in 2 paragraphs” options or the dedicated “summarisation services”. Many people naturally have ethical concerns about the type of AI they typically use, alongside the ever-present risk that they in fact fail to summarise the content correctly.
If however we determine that these services do have a legitimate place, then again I feel like - at least for me - they’re addressing situational overload. I’d be using them as filters for “do I want to read the whole thing?” rather than as a substitute for “I have read the whole thing”.
Of course, if you’ve a need to get the basic gist of a book very quickly but have no desire to spend substantial time working through it then those services might potentially work well for that - I haven’t checked the efficacy studies! - but that lack of desire isn’t the problem I face.
So what is the solution? Carr doesn’t really present one. Perhaps there are none, other than somehow reconciling oneself to be able to happily live whilst giving up on the idea that we could possibly indulge in even a sizeable fraction of the things we’re interested in within this new(ish) world of information abundance. Or, as Keenan writes, accepting that “It’s okay if we don’t consume all of the world’s information before we die”.