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Information Overload

Bill M
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At a recent technology conference in California, Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, declared not only that he spends most of his time "assuming the world is not ready for the technological revolution that will be happening to them soon," but that the amount of new information created every two days by human beings is equal to the amount of information created from the beginning of history up until 2003.

 

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Comments

This is not really true

Submitted by Kung Fu Jones on Tue, 08/10/2010 - 20:13.

This is not really true though. Movement is a kind of information--are people moving more or less than before? Everything is information. Just imagine J.P. Morgan asking "Where can I put the meter?" and you'll realize why that fact is typically ignored.

 

The kind of information that has increased, is the kind that can be most easily manipulated for profit. So the real story is less about an information explosion, than about advances in automated profit-making and -taking. Don't forget that Google is first and foremost an advertising brokerage.

Re to Kung Fu jones

Submitted by droplet on Tue, 08/10/2010 - 20:54.
not necessarily, we can look at all the revolutions in art and design springing out of the digital world. It is easier now to create music and video than it ever was. People are making websites, their own social networks, and media with more and more ease everyday. people are editing videos off of their iphones now... this makes me think of McKenna and the whole time-wave thing getting more and more complex at an exponential rate... i'd say we are right on track

Additional recording is not new information

Submitted by Arkayne on Sat, 08/14/2010 - 21:24.
Certainly some new information is generated every day--scientific discoveries, anthropological theories, engineering and technical advances. But most of the 'information' that this google bastard is talking about is records--blogs, videos, photographs. None of that 'content' is new information. The ideas for blogs exist in the brains of the writers, the photons captured on video and and in photographs would have existed, as information, without the presence of the recording devices. There may be an explosion in recording, data collection, and data transfer, but how can that be justifiably interpreted as new information? The majority of these data are fundamentally useless: updates to facebook profiles (Jimmy is: now flossing my ass), posts to youtube (Raccoon Fucks Cat). This should not make you think about the McKenna exponential increase of novelty idea. There is no such trend. I don't deny that there has been a massive increase in e.g. digital art, but that is not novelty. Digital art is just a variation on the same theme that we've been using since the paleolithic, or whenever art started. Likewise with music. Blogs are like little newspapers with very few readers and poor editing. So I'm skeptical. And I generally agree with Mr. Jones.

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