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04 November 2008
The crowd that knew too much?
Blogging for the Demos think tank, Samuel Jones comments on a new piece by James Surowiecki in this week’s New Yorker. In the article, Surowiecki suggests that one of the root causes of today’s financial panic is that we simply have too much information coming at us. Jones makes an elegant suggestion: the problem might not be too much info, but too few ways to frame it and understand it:
It’s not that masses of information is a bad thing, far from it. What is an issue, however, is how we manage it. The more we know, the more fragmented we can become, and – as Onora O’Neill wrote in her Reith Lectures – the harder it becomes to trust and operate within the institutions by which we seek to manage our society.
Read the blog post from Samuel Jones on Demos >>
Watch James Surowiecki’s TEDTalk on the power of shared information >>
Discuss this Blog Post
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David Lockman
Dec 6 2008The trouble (and the eventual saving grace) of social media is its democratic flatness. Anyone can be heard by everyone. But people talk whether or not they have something useful to bring to the conversation. Without content that has both value and originality, social media may be reduced to the lowest common denominator, as happened with CB radio in the USA in the 1970′s. Everyone was on the few available channels, and it devolved into a useless hash of interference and profanity. When the masses moved on to other interests, CB radio eventually returned to some degree of usefulness, and can now be successfully used by truckers and a few enthusiasts. Perhaps we’ll see the same thing happen with social media, as new “channels” and portals are established, and reputations are earned. Users eventually turn away in frustration from things that don’t work. I would expect that same kind of shakeout to take place in social media.
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Ron C. de Weijze
This conclusion, ‘we never have enough information it’s just the wherewithall’, doesn’t feel right to me. You cannot be taught anything you do not have a concept for. Your lifelong perceptual training will not let you bite off more than you can chew. On the other hand, surely you will feel happier when your capacity for coping with information increases when the functional structure of your knowledge improves or its level rises. However, in such cases the content of the information relates to that constructive recollection in particular. So this fit between knowledge and its evidence (information) is the gatekeeper and limits the management capability – NOT just any information let alone any amount of it.