I have been dealing with the Internet for so many years, it has become boring. I have beaten the Internet. The end guy was pretty hard.
I was reading an interview the other day located at this fine url.
This was an interview of Clay Shirky. I find Clay’s view on the current state of social entanglement fascinating. In this interview one of the topics that came up was that of information overload. I feel this every single day. There is so much. For instance, I am currently preparing a set of presentations for the mainframe based conference SHARE. I have three sessions. One I have done before, called Comparing and Contrasting Virtualization technologies. The other two are new. SOA Security, which I got tricked into doing, already has the presentation done. I am also putting together a session that deals with running the IBM HTTP Server which is based on Apache on z/OS and how that compares to the older DWG/IHS/ICSS HTTP server that IBM has shipped with z/OS since 1995.
For each of those topics, I have found about 10 billion pieces of work. There is just so much information out there. Like I stated before, I have beaten the Internet. I used my skills as a professional web user to cull this information. I need to vet certain things.
I needed to filter.
And that is what Clay hinted at in this interview. There is now information overload, there is filter failure. He spoke of Library of Alexandria and said that pretty much since the, when there was more information than any person could ingest in a life time in once place, information overload was created.
I have my ways of filtering things. Google Reader is a big one. When I am searching for something in particular, I tend to use Google’s image search or something like “site:share.org ext:ppt Apache” on Google to fine presentations of Apache on the SHARE site.
By the time I got to the end of the interview I had already reached for my copy of “Here Comes Everyone”, Clay’s latest book. I read this on a plane to France last October. It started out really interesting, and the interview made me recall some of the tidbits hidden between those pages. The information filtering topic kinda fits in with this expansion of the social web. We are seeing vast amounts of data being thrown up to that series of tubes in the sky and there are just tremendous results. Sites like Flickr, Delicious, and Reddit are giving everyone the ability to quickly, personally, and publicly categorize seemingly random data. We can tag pictures, people and places. Everyone makes everything more accessible. And now with Facebook, Myspace and what ever the next big friend site we can share this information to a network of friends and friends of friends.
For example, finding music I might like used to involved a lot of failed attempts. I used to have to stay up really late to watch Subterranean on MTV. Now I have Last.fm. I have collected a ton of information about the music I like and don’t like just by passively listening to music. Last.fm takes this information and similar information about what your friends listen to and makes suggestions.
I feel that the social web, or semantic web or Web 2.0 or whatever people are calling it is about context. Building a context that is important you each person. This massive amount of unfiltered Internet needs to have context wrapped around it. We are still trying to figure out what we are doing with it. The web is still building itself. We are adding context. Things like locations aware applications on the iPhone and Android are bridging the gap between the real world and the virtual world while at the same time giving new context to information that is already out there.
The last thing I want to touch on about this interview was the act of unlearning. Clay talks to this point at the end of the interview and it is something that I have never really thought about before. I still call people. My friends 16 year old daughter rarely talks on the phone. Now I send text messages just like the rest of the twenty somethings with a cell phone. (Unlike Dr. Eli MD who lives in the dark ages with a land line.) I just don’t use text messages and the wall on Facebook as my primary mode of communication. I feel that like my parents have to unlearn the Dewey decimal system, I may have to unlearn talking to people on the phone. At the same token, I do all my banking on the the Internet. I pay my rent by a monthly scheduled account to account transfer. My pay it direct deposited. My bills are paid online automatically. Mint manages my budget. My Dad would have none of this. Not that he hates computers. He doesn’t go to a travel agent to book flights. But he would not dare trust a computer, or the Internet, with his financial data. That is something he might have to unlearn.
I leave you folks with this video: Institutions vs. collaboration
