Imagine a circle a little larger than a typical computer screen in size (2000 pixels in diameter). Now imagine one single pixel in that circle. If that single pixel represents your friends list on Facebook (ca. 1000 people), then the entire circle is a good representation of the global online population (ca. 1 billion people).
Anyone following 1000 people will easily attest that this seems like information overload — but I will instead repeat what Clay Shirky has said so well: It is better referred to as “Filter Failure“. The information seeking task today is: How to select the relevant information from the vast pool of resources available?
We cannot see all of it — to do so would mean to follow a million facebook-sized friends lists. So how do we filter out the “1 in a million” sources of information?
We apply filters.
For example:
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Language
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Geographic Location / Neighborhood
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Socio-Economic Class
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Religion
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School, College or Institution
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Age
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Gender
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Interests, Hobbies, etc.
Do some of these criteria sound familiar? If you are a member of facebook, they very well might — because facebook uses hyperlinking to enable such links to be made.
However: lets say you have an ache or a pain (i.e., a health question) or you want some help to decide which movie to watch, which song or music to listen to (and so on) — would you want to select such information based on your neighborhood? Or based on your socio-economic class?
Or take another example: Let’s say you are concerned about the economy or perhaps about your children’s prospects for the future, and you want to chat with other people about such topics. In that instance, would your gender or the gender of other people be relevant? Would it matter whether or not they like to play tennis or backgammon?
If we apply the wrong filter, then we only have ourselves to blame if the results — i.e. the conversations and discussions in such forums — seem like meaningless noise (or “information overload”).
In most cases, the answers to our questions ought not to rely so much on our conversation / discussion partner’s personal attributes, but rather on the topic of the discussion. And since most people are interested in many different things, this means that following a particular person is actually a rather random approach.
Note, however, that random is not necessarily wrong — it is only when we want to know something particular that a random, general universal approach is inappropriate. If you know the question you are trying to find an answer to, then it makes sense to pose that question to a community of people who care about that topic or issue — and that is what the Wisdom of the Language is all about!
