Clay Shirky on information overload, filter failure and personal privacy
September 22nd, 2008 • Human Rights, Law, Media
Here’s a good video of Clay Shirky discussing information overload, rethinking it as filter failure. He makes the point that ‘information overload’ has been around since Gutenberg, and it is really a problem of not using/having proper filters to deal with information. More interesting is his discussion of privacy using the story of his friend breaking off an engagement on Facebook and trying to control how that information spread through her social network. Whereas prior to Facebook imperfect information distribution was a feature, not a bug, of our natural social networks, now information spreads instantaneously when you update your profile forcing us to rethink how we ‘curate’ our online lives.
Even more interesting, for me, is what he was kind of incidentally discussing – what makes these new online spaces different. For me the major new issue online social networks, blogs, etc, have created is the conversion of what was once transient conversations, information and publications into permanent ones. The minute I publish this blog it will available for all on this site, and soon cached on Google, Web Archive and a huge number of other scrapers that copy my content (with and without my permission). Similarly, twitter updates and facebook status updates and uploaded photos hang around a long time, even embarrassing ones. I’m not sure we’ve quite adapted to what that means for us in the long term.
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