Nicolas Carr set the cat among pigeons, provocatively stating that Google is making us stupid. This was followed by a rather bland exposition of how interconnected digital age is leading to short attention spans and fueling our cognitive decline. Clay Shirky dissed this prevalent idea of information overload and called it as a ?filter failure? instead.
It?s impossible to expand the conceptual idea of rapidly proliferating interweb, in part, thanks to influx of smartphones that allows instant self publishing, and growing chasm with our digital self-existence, due to space constraints. However, Bertram Gross deserves to be credited with it?s original ideation that excessive information overwhelms our physical senses incapacitating our decision making and reported loss of productivity.
This author would instead concur with Wurman and Tufte (cognitive scientists) who define this ?overload?,in simplistic terms, as lack of organisation and focus. To facilitate logical thinking and productive outcomes all it requires is some effort to plug-in leakages in digital deluge. Due to nature of work, this author had to significantly re-work priorities to cope up with firehose of published research information.
Many startups have focused their efforts to generate a ?filter bubble? either by paginator, algorithimic, filtering, curation or aggregator approaches. The inherent problem with either of them is lack of serendipity and a statistical probability that you might miss something important. This reviewer calls his implementation of tackling overload as ?thoughtful information management? than rely exclusively on algorithmic approaches alone. (Disclaimer: The author has no affiliation to products/websites mentioned herein).
The first step is to do an effective search which includes ?deep-net?, not otherwise represented, in broad based ?horizontal? search engines. ?Relevance? is an individualistic characteristic where precise outcomes have all search terms in required output; as a hard core domain of complicated mathematical verbiage. Duckduckgo (mentioned previously in these columns) is able to add meaning (and relevance to some extent) in search results, compared to Google, by narrowing down the scope of search and speeding up information acquisition.
This reviewer is heavily dependent on Pubmed (and Quertle), a database of medical literature. Pubmed offers MesH terms and a recent upgrade offers natural language query processing. By use of specific terms and boolean operators, it?s easy and quick to narrow down articles of interest and conform exactly to reviewer?s specific requirement. This reviewer specifically indexes the search output and relevant articles through Zotero (an open source Firefox add-on) making retrieval efficient. Each specific search can be piped through it?s own XML feed which offers real time updates in news reader while tracking incremental additions of research papers on a particular topic.
Email has also been cited as a drain on time. Being faced by deluge of spam and often loosing out important mail, this reviewer learnt to properly implement Thunderbird, the open source email client from Mozilla, and IMAP access from Fastmail offering custom server side sieve scripts. This allows unprecedented access to direct mail in specific nested folders based on specific keywords or even MIME types, set up virtual aliases and kill spam at the server level itself. As a result, the only priority email goes through, is needing attention.
This reviewer is excited by advent of meta-data than raw sources like Twitter/Facebook which add chaos to entropy. Tags are non-hierarchical terms to define information. Newer search engines are able to filter out the tags, assign specific weightage to them and filter out information based on how importance is assigned to them in the ?tag cloud?. This is a crude example of filtering information based on meta-data but it serves the reviewer?s purpose well in Newsblur (mentioned previously). Apart from this, each website being followed through it?s own XML Feed have been arranged in hierarchical manner in specific folders depending on whether this reviewer has to skim or read it in depth. Combination with specific tags (after ?training? Newsblur) is a powerful method as a filter to deal with ?overload?.
Interweb encompasses all quadrants of ?discovery matrix? and is a fascinating way to discover knowledge. There is no ?killer approach? but a continuous evolution in our own scope and understanding about ourselves as to where we fit in the digital firmament.
The writer is a practicing doctor with keen interest in technology