Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Bullshit information

I am sorry for writing about a topic that, I am sure, has been discussed numerous times, but this was my moment of enlightenment when I could grasp it. Thank you for the understanding.

Used to having gigabytes of memory, where we can store ANYTHING we want, we stop caring about what is valuable and what is bullshit. The evolution of storage is starting to kill valuable information. This is happening in two ways.
On the one hand, having to not decide on the spot what is valuable information and what is not, we are prone to keep much more than we actually need; we postpone the selection for later (the moment when our hard drive is full :). Thus, the amount of information without value (repetative information, or bullshit) increases and perpetuates itself, diluting the information to which we are exposed. So, although we have A WHOLE LOT MORE information, A WHOLER LOT MORE of it is bullshit. Thus, although it is easier for us to find information, it is more difficult for us to find valuable information.
On the other, this change perpetuatees within us too. If we know that we have only a limited amount of space to store information, we will inevitably select the important information for storage. We will discard the rubbish. However, as we do not have to decide on the spot, we might be tempted to postpone the decision for later numerous times. This diminishes our selection abilities in terms of information and leaves us piled with a whole lot of stuff that is extremely hard to sort, let alone subdue itself to extracting of value.

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