Information Overload:
The one-way content revolution has got it
wrong
By Billy
Glennon
Like most people who came to work on the morning of September 12
2001, I felt lost, disoriented. What I was doing seemed irrelevant
to the appalling act of terrorism witnessed on TV the previous day.
The act of working seemed disrespectful in some way. Everyone
seemed confused, frightened, and at a loss.
What was presented on our screens that week was not content. To
refer to it as content is almost blasphemy. We were presented with
something much more significant. We know that this week has changed
us all, has changed our sense of how we are in the world.
News as content
We can imagine some people ten years from now browsing through
old newsreels and reading on the Internet looking at the same
footage in a slightly disinterested way and describing this as
content. Much of the meaning goes, the relevance is lost and the
impact on people missed entirely.
This is significant. So much information and news is being
pushed at us, a whole new anxiety is emerging as we feel powerless
because we can't keep on top of all the information we might regard
as relevant. We can become like machines desperate to process and
access as much content as we can. Mobile phone usage is an
interesting example. The number of calls is increasing but the
messages are getting shorter and more banal.
There was a moment during the dotcom revolution when the
expression 'Content Is King' was bandied about a lot. It felt
prophetic; content was a buzzword. Now people are asking, "Is
content really that important? Why hasn't content worked for us?
Why does so much Web content seem awful and out-of-date?"
Such questions lead us to shallow answers. The 'solution'
currently offered is for technology to give us more, better,
faster, up-to-date content, wherever we are, all the time. The
result is that people are bombarded by information, leaving them
with a sense of being disconnected from the world.
Human context
The only way to overcome this frustration is to change the way
we think about content - to think about it in a human context, not
a technological context.
The media that grew up in the 20th century evolved clear
structures and processes to decide what content is 'relevant' (and,
by its absence, what is irrelevant). The press determines what
affairs are current and newsworthy; radio stations decide the music
we should listen to; glossy magazines tell us what's hot and what's
not.
The missing truth is that the relevancy of a piece of music or
an article lies with the person who interacts with that content.
What is meaningful to one person may or may not be meaningful to
another.
Each of us brings our own 'filters' - different ways of
perceiving - when we interact with content. Four people can read
the same novel; each will have a different experience of that
novel, because of their unique perceptions, coloured by their
cultural background, among other things. Furthermore, an individual
can read a single novel four times and each time have a different
experience - depending on his or her changing moods, and so on.
Changing perspectives
Before we can take advantage of radical new technologies such as
the Internet, we must first realise that the usefulness and
relevancy of any piece of content does not rest with the
technology, but with people.
Already we are seeing how the internet can be used to amplify
the human ability to find meaning in content. Sites like Amazon
allow visitors to review and rate books, music and so on. If you
like a visitor's book review, you can read other reviews that
he/she has written. The reviews can be highly relevant to you, but
may be irrelevant to others.
The experience of reading a trail of reviews is like going on a
journey, peppered with relevant content, using a map created by
another person. Indeed, this experience is closer to that of real
conversation, where people make recommendations and introduce
related topics.
As with the arrival of any new technology or medium, the
Internet can help change the way we think about human interaction -
about what it means to be human. The Internet has already made us
question fundamental ideas about community and identity. For the
first time, a person can choose to be part of many communities with
which they might have no social or geographical connection.
Perhaps, then, we should not ask, "How important is Internet
content?" but "Can we grasp these new opportunities to make our
interactions with content feel more human?"
We are self-interpreting beings. Events like September 11, even
though tragic, can put us more in touch with what it means to be
human, and help bring meaning and a sense of peace. Great poetry
and music, provided we give the time to reflect and reinterpret,
can do the same.
As processors of information and users of content we can become
like our machines - concentrating on processing as much as possible
as quickly as possible. The machines can do the information
processing much better than us. Only we can bring meaning, richness
and a sense of depth to our lives and the lives of others by seeing
beyond the content to the lives and the stories of the human
beings.
Our capacity for reflection and reinterpretation, and the
importance of such activities, has been missed by the information
age revolution. Our mechanistic model of this age -
input-process-output - does not allow for this essential human
characteristic. This is one way that the information or content
revolution of the Internet has gone wrong.
I believe that the next generation of tools will be about
helping us to become more human, helping us get clear about what is
important for us in our lives and helping us get connected to each
other in a deeper way than our ever-increasing and ever-shortening
text messages.
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