i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

I came across the following article: "Ev Williams: Twitter Will Actually Help Information Overload" 

http://gigaom.com/2010/09/02/ev-williams-twitter-will-actually-help-information-overload/

And it got me thinking about the age we live in—how we are bombarded with information of all kinds from every direction and still somehow manage to survive.  The key, I think, is in how we organize and retrieve information. 

In the following article, Twitter CEO Evan Williams states that Twitter is a "recipient-driven medium." He argues that Twitter is well suited to handle information overload. According to Williams, the problem with email is that "it's sender-driven, and sender-driven media doesn't scale." An email can be spammy because the sender uses it as a free tool to reach a wide range of audience, when in reality few people have the interest in reading the email. Tweeting is better than emailing because people, "who have something to say," find their audience. Unlike Google, Twitter attracts people who are not sure what they need at a particular time but still have many different interests.

I think Twitter plays a role in these five questions—what, why, how much, when, and by whom the information is organized, as discussed in 202 class. Twitter is a stream of information that resembles "The Library of Babel." Without being organized and placed within a clearly identified context, the stream of information does not make sense to anyone. That's when we think of experiencing a state of "information overload." Information overload happens in these cases: when information given to us is out of context and, therefore, does not make sense to us, or when we are bombarded with constant stream of new stimuli and we cannot keep up with organizing a new collection of facts. Although Twitter can foster information overload, it can as well assist in managing information when treated as an organizational tool.

What makes Twitter different from other organizational tools such as Google or del.icio.us? Twitter integrates both types of organizational methods—the user can retrieve information in two ways—either search in a pile of tweets or follow different authors of interest. In other words, a person can organize information at a time of need or organize it when information is presented or tweeted. 

But a new question emerges: Is information overload good or bad? The answer is, probably, yes...