Overloaded? It's Filter Failure

Do you think "information overload" is ruining your life? We devoted an entire episode to how the tools designed for effiency are leaving us more distracted and less productive.

Well, technologist Clay Shirky (also a past guest on the show) argues that information overload isn't the problem we make it out to be: it's really a failure of information filters. When he thought his e-mail spam had doubled, he checked and saw that it had really only increased by 25 percent. As he says, "it wasn't about the increase in volume, it was about the collapse of the filters I was using."

At last week's Web 2.0 Expo, Shirky said the Internet has made it easier and cheaper for publishers to broadcast information — so now it's up to the consumer to filter out the noise.

Watch Shirky's presentation here [via LifeHacker]:

(Photo by Sybren Stüvel)