Information Deluge

We are drowning in data. How do we manage it without getting lost?


Folksonomies: future shock information data overload

Memes

24 DEC 2013

 The Neccessity of Selective Attention

Three decades ago, cognitive scientist Colin Martindale advanced the idea that each of us has several subselves, and he connected his idea to emerging ideas in cognitive science. Central to Martindale’s thesis were a few fairly simple ideas, such as selective attention, lateral inhibition, state-dependent memory, and cognitive dissociation. Although there are billions of neurons in our brains firing all the time, we’d never be able to put one foot in front of the other if we were unable to ig...
Folksonomies: attention perception
Folksonomies: attention perception
  1  notes

Douglas T. Kenrick explains how our senses are bombarded, so we filter. If we could not filter, we would become incapacitated.

20 DEC 2013

 Social Fragmentation is Freedom

Urbanism—the city dweller's way of life—has preoccupied sociology since the turn of the century. Max Weber pointed out the obvious fact that people in cities cannot know all their neighbors as intimately as it was possible for them to do in small communities. Georg Simmel carried this idea one step further when he declared, rather quaintly, that if the urban individual reacted emotionally to each and every person with whom he came into contact, or cluttered his mind with information about the...
  1  notes

People lament the watering-down of interpersonal relationships in social networks, but total relationships--with all their faults and positives--restrict our freedoms and overwhelm us.

19 DEC 2013

 Accelerating Knowledge

The rate at which man has been storing up useful knowledge about himself and the universe has been spiraling upward for 10,000 years. The rate took a sharp upward leap with the invention of writing, but even so it remained painfully slow over centuries of time. The next great leap forward in knowledge—acquisition did not occur until the invention of movable type in the fifteenth century by Gutenberg and others. Prior to 1500, by the most optimistic estimates, Europe was producing books at a r...
  1  notes

Toffler describes and quantifies the increasing production of information in human civilization and its implications.

31 JAN 2012

 Scientists Must Learn to Forget Facts

Like all things of the mind, science is a brittle thing: it becomes absurd when you look at it too closely. It is designed for few at a time, not as a mass profession. But now we have megascience: an immense apparatus discharging in a minute more bursts of knowledge than humanity is able to assimilate in a lifetime. Each of us has two eyes, two ears, and, I hope, one brain. We cannot even listen to two symphonies at the same time. How do we get out of the horrible cacophony that assails our m...
  1  notes

Forgetting the unessential is crucial to surviving information overload.



References

19 DEC 2013

 Future Shock

Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book:  Toffler, Alvin (1990), Future Shock, Random House LLC, Retrieved on 2013-12-19
  • Source Material [books.google.com]
  • Folksonomies: social science
    Folksonomies: social science
     10  
    19 DEC 2013

     This Will Make You Smarter

    Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book:  Brockman , John (2012-02-14), This Will Make You Smarter, HarperCollins, Retrieved on 2013-12-19
  • Source Material [books.google.com]
  • Folksonomies: science
    Folksonomies: science
     52  
    31 JAN 2012

     Voices In the Labyrinth: Nature, Man, and Science

    Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book:  Chargaff , Erwin (1977), Voices In the Labyrinth: Nature, Man, and Science, Harper San Francisco, Retrieved on 2012-01-31
  • Source Material [books.google.com]
  • Folksonomies: reference
    Folksonomies: reference
     2