Information R/evolution (And Potential Overrun)

Back in March, I alerted you to a compelling video clip, created by Kansas State University assistant professor of cultural anthropology Michael Wesch, on the ‘Web 2.0′ collaborative potential for the Internet. Today, courtesy of Boing Boing, I’m able to share Wesch’s latest 5:28-long (and well worth your viewing time, IMHO) creation with you, on the opportunity to rethink the ways in which we archive, access and use information:

Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow comments that the ‘video explains how awesome it is that everything is miscellaneous’. He further notes, ‘This is a gloriously optimistic video about our collective power to make sense of the world in a way never dreamt of in the days of paper organization.’ While to some degree I resonate with Doctorow’s stance, I’m admittedly not quite as sanguine as he is.

Information overload is something I struggle with on a daily basis, admittedly in no small part due to my personality’s ‘control’ tendency towards obsessing about learning increasingly more about topics that I find interesting…in the process not operating out of a fundamental understanding that there will always be more to learn about even just one subject (far from a suite of them) than any one person has available time and energy. Personality inclinations aside, I’m sure you can also understand how in a job like mine, covering dozens of technologies and hundreds of companies, the incoming information flow often feels like an unstoppable raging torrent.

Just last weekend I finally began culling a huge backlog of low-priority to-be-processed-later emails from Outlook (which had created a voluminous and complicated database that in part probably explains last week’s troubles). This backlog stretched back more than three years, to the point where my now-deceased father’s ALS reached a critical stage and I had to redirect attention away from the information torrent and towards his daily care. Although I knew in advance that this email pruning would cultivate stress reduction, I was still pleasantly surprised to see how much relief I felt as I began transferring email addresses to contacts entries and hitting the email ‘delete’ key. And this relief allowed me to more intimately realize how much of a perpetual ‘monkey on the back’ the information inflow torrent really is.