Too Much Information
http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/30/revolution/
In the above article, Sarah Perez from Techcrunch discusses our connection with with the digital world and the effect it has has on individuals. She complains that our constant connection to the virual world is draining us and cannot be permanently maintained, that it will burn us out. Even though we often don’t realize how much it’s burning us out as we take advantage of the benefits it provides, our society has already been captivated by the idea of a world without any of our technological “drugs” (NBC’s new TV show, Revolution, which is setting record ratings according to an article linked by Perez). In the end, Perez argues that we need progress to be made in controlling our interactions with this digital world: figure out what can help you keep up with what is important while reducing your time interacting directly with the vast amounts of information being thrown at us over the internet.
Basically, imagine yourself as a single node in a network graph. All the different sources of information represent directed edges from that source (as a node) to you. So for example, this blog post represents information being sent from me to you. If you comment, then I’ll have more information coming from you to me. As we keep adding new sources of news, new ways to connect to other people, photo sharing, video sharing, internet searches, online encyclopedias, forums, and more, we create more and more potential edges between ourselves and other people. As the number of edges to you skyrockets, you reach the point where you have too much information available: you cannot process all of the information from all of the nodes you have access to. Unfortunately, not all of this information is useful. In order to maximize our efficiency, we have to create new nodes that read information from sources we have access to, filter it, and provide us with the best of all the info the node has access to. As we narrow 100 nodes down to just 10, we can even create another node to filter those 10 down to just 1, that provides us with the best of the best of the best.
We can think of this method as a way of maximizing the payoff of connections in the network. Let’s say that 1 out of 10 news stories from a particular news source is very interesting to us (payoff of 10), but the other 9/10 are boring and a waste of our time (-1 payoff each). Net-net, we still go on that news site because the average payoff is still positive, if only a little bit. But if we could develop a filter for that site that finds stories we want, then the average payoff from that website could be boosted all the way up to 10: only return the most interesting stories. If we could do that for every source of information available to us, imagine how much more productive and efficient we could be!
Perez’s suggestion is already a topic of major research (Facebook’s news feed, Pulse News, Google’s search bar, etc.), and it will be exciting to see how we can continue to refine the boundary between humans and the digital world, scraping away the junk and leaving the gems that our connectedness can provide for us.
-Tuzongyu