Taking things too in context

If a tree falls on Twitter, is there still a forest to be seen?

The rise of contemporary technology journalism has been principally a celebration of rapid innovation. Rapid innovation is worth celebrating, worth sharing, and worth discussing, but should these be done so rapidly?

The core problem lies in the way we process and synthesize information. There is a belief that the more information one has, the better a decision will be. Knows more = smarter = better decisions. Unfortunately, it's not that simple.

Unfortunately, when you don't know specific information, you don't know how much you don't know. However, the more information you have, the more confident you are in the assertion that your decision or position is correct. When you don't have the knowledge, you can't make the prediction and you know you can't make the prediction, however, when you have some information, you think you can make the prediction, even if you can't. It's this hubris, this overconfidence in believing one is right because they already know so much, that lends itself to bad decision making because of this overconfidence of precision (this is all straight of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's masterwork The Black Swan). In other words, information overload not only makes it harder for us to process more information, it makes us bad decisionmakers.

Now what does this have to do with the internet? Take a look at my Twitter feed - these are the conversations I'm supposed to be following as they're going on. There are about 100 people who are all talking in short snippets on what they're thinking about. It's incredible for what it is, and in the communities it's become ubiquitous in, it's really been transformative as a conversation tool for understanding what's going on now.

Twitter has also been incredibly transformative as a tool in less free environments, but that's the subject of a different, more optimistic, post.

There are some people who approach tools like Twitter with the expectation that they should follow every conversation and posting in real time. All day, every day, short "tweets" pop up on their desktops, their phones, and they have to be a part of the conversation 24/7. They get lost in the sea of messages, and their real-life relationships suffer. Take this to the next level. Lets not track conversations, lets track people, and lets see what they're doing online. Social network service aggregators make it easy to see all your friends online activities in one place. Tools like FriendFeed and SocialThing make it simple to see what everyone's doing, but it quickly scales into chaos. Take a look at Robert Scoble's FriendFeed. Scoble follows 16,000 people this way, somehow managing to see what's new and cool before everyone else as a result. But Scoble's the exception. Information overload removes context, making it harder to derive meaning.

Ultimately, getting lost in the sea of irrelevant information makes it more difficult for the rapid innovation that much of the discussion is supposed to be celebrating in the first place.