Information Overload: The Last Mile
Some days you’re just berated with too much news, advice, or extraneous tidbits. If you’re like me, you decide to explore how you’re getting your information in a quest to kill the source of irrelevance. After looking over your Twitter followers, scanning your RSS subscriptions, pondering over your podcast subscriptions, and possibly even evaluating who you associate with in real life (remember that thing?), you either decide to look for new ways of getting your information or you just give up. After giving up too many times, you may have come to the conclusion that it’s not where or who you’re getting your information from that’s the problem, it’s how broad the conversations are.
In the world of life streaming and news feeds, information is no longer a single cohesive work like a book. It’s hundreds of 140-character blurbs. It is very hard to determine if a single snippet is worth reading without actually reading it. The current metrics we use to determine relevance are age, popularity, source, and general topic. News that is newer tends to be more relevant. Popular information is also considered more relevant. Who we get our information from plays a key part in determining value. We also pre-select certain general topics when we subscribe to an RSS feed or podcast. Unfortunately, these metrics do not scale too well. Aggregating information from hundreds of places tends to piss us off instead of enlightening us. Why is this?
The problem lies in the last mile. After your RSS reader pulls information from all of your subscriptions, it just spits it all out at you and expects you to dig through it. The same goes for Twitter. You’re expected to read everything any of your followers tweet. Podcasts are a similar story. The same goes for Facebook’s news feed. Obviously, there’s a lot of good information in there, but is it all relevant all the time? No.
So what do we do? I have a few ideas, but what do you think? As curators of our own information, how do we filter that last mile to come up with highly relevant information? Is it even something we should be trying to fix? I imagine a world where our information presents itself only when it’s relevant, and we get to decide how much of it to consume,
