But the library hasn’t started the daunting task of sorting or filtering its 133 terabytes of Twitter data, which it receives from Gnip in chronological bundles, in any meaningful way…. “You often hear a reference to Twitter as a fire hose, that constant stream of tweets going around the world. What we have here is a large and growing lake. What we need is the technology that allows us to both understand and make useful that lake of information.
I devour more new facts in a day than my ancestors ate in a lifetime.
There’s a real richness to it, but there’s also powerful existential
indigestion. And when you swallow the world’s information, there are
inevitable toxins, so many raw, wild, and often conflicting chunks
During the 19th century, an unprecedented increase in the number of books printed in the US and Europe resulted in the emergence of new and bewildering mass markets. In response, best-books lists, reading guides, library selection manuals, and lists of prohibited books appeared, all purporting to help readers, librarians, and book providers to navigate this new sea of printed matter
Abigail Sellen and Steve Whittaker have actually argued against recording too much. Useful information is better than exhaustive information, because the term “digital memories” is a bit of misnomer: what’s more important is what actual, brain-stored memories your digital records can spark.
Plato (channeling the nonwriter Socrates) warned that this technology meant impoverishment: For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom
Time away from digital media is not only no longer our default state; it is also something we cannot experience without explicitly aiming to do so.
Outbox … securely intercepts and scans physical, letter-sized mail, catalogs, bills, and anything else that one would receive in the mail. With same-day turnaround, the service then pushes the email to your iPad, where the mail can be read, tagged, and stored indefinitely… The user can then decide to have the mail sent physically – more common for personal, handwritten letters that have sentimental value – or can have the mail shredded.
Facing a sea of infinity, it’s easy to despair, sure that you will never reach dry land, never have the sense of accomplishment of saying, “I’m done.” At the same time, to be finished, done, complete—this is a bit like being dead. The silence and the feeling that maybe that’s all. For the marketer, the freelancer and the entrepreneur, the challenge is to level set, to be comfortable with the undone, with the cycle of never-ending. We were trained to finish our homework, our peas and our chores. Today, we’re never finished, and that’s okay.
We become cavalier about preservation, not just because Google serves as an outboard brain, but because we are conditioned to assume that the stuff we care about will automatically stick around. You’d think that would be liberating. And, for the most part, it is. (The history! The timeline! The cloud!) But there are also drawbacks to digital omniscience. It’s telling that people diagnosed with hyperthymesia have described their limitless memories not as blessings, but as burdens — ones that are “non-stop, uncontrollable, and totally exhausting.” Near-perfect recall of their experiences doesn’t make these people smarter; it makes them miserable. Same deal, to a large extent, with the web. That’s one reason people decry “information overload,” not to mention a reason for proposals of digital sabbaths and the like…
At midnight tonight I will leave the internet. I’m abandoning one of my “top 5” technological innovations of all time for a little peace and quiet. If I can survive the separation, I’m going to do this for a year. Yeah, I’m serious. I’m not leaving The Verge, and I’m not becoming a hermit, I just won’t use the internet in my personal or work life, and won’t ask anyone to use it for me.
Depending on your perspective, you might be completely shocked that I’d even attempt such a thing, or you might be completely unimpressed. For me personally, the decision felt like a big, crazy idea at first, and now it’s started to seem a perfectly natural evolution of my life with technology.
— I’m leaving the internet for a year | The Verge (via ayjay) I’m very curious to see how this goes… It will be a fascinating experiment, not the practicalities, but what after a few months he really misses
the art of scaling is to filter contributions so each participant sees only the contributions they personally will find most valuable and stimulating; the important thing isn’t what we see, it’s what we get to ignore
It’s as if we’re all trapped at a permanent reunion with everyone we ever bumped into at a street fair or waved to mistakenly in the cafeteria.
“The entire world has become this Dickensian series in which you are not visited by three ghosts but by eight million ghosts,”
In the digital age we filter forward instead of filtering out. As a result, all that material is still available to us and to others to filter in their own ways, and to bring forward in other contexts. That is a very significant difference. You may filter those 10 articles, but all the other ones will still show up in a search, or tomorrow you may get them in an email from a friend or Google+ recommending that particular link. Nothing is removed.
the information revolution came without an instruction manual. All the data in the world cannot teach us how to sift through data; images don’t show us how to process images. The only way to do justice to our onscreen lives is by summoning exactly the emotional and moral clarity that can’t be found on any screen
