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How can we cope with information overload?

Tue, 09/21/2010 - 20:33 — saghar


I remember the old days in school when finding online articles or electronic books was not as easy as today. There was neither easy internet access nor enough content available. If a person could manage to access to the internet, the resources s/he was able to find were limited and very often unorganized.

Since a few years ago, I could feel the information revolution. Specialists, businesses, individuals, institutions, entrepreneurs, and all other live entities try to take the most advantage of information flow. The new issue is not information accessibility anymore but information integration and validity.

When it comes to our personal lives, it might bring us an information-overload issue. We tweet, post blogs, change our status on Facebook, post audios and videos, and more. We put information out there. On the other hand, we follow our social networks' news, read online, look for other types of information, and more. We simply retrieve data from different sources of information.

Do we have time to retrieve all, let's say "relevant", information? What if a service could timely provide us with a prioritized list of information based on our storing and retrieval behavior? Does it save us time? Would we interact with it? How would we feel about it?

This article is talking about an interesting notion in human behavioral science. My6Sense is an iPhone application which aims to study the user's behavior, predicts their interests accordingly and yields "wanted" information to them when needed. 

It seems an open-ended project yet since making a knowledge base of individuals' behavior has still a lot of progress potential. But it looks to be a good start!

http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/02/03/content.overload/index.html