Quote: "There is no Information Overload, there is just selection failure!"

Really? Internet nerds and the Generation Web loves to brag about all the information revolution, how it empowers users and saves the world. But instead we are polluted with information noise …

Blame Bill for all that sticky information at your fingertips.

Information Overload and Noise

The self-proclaimed internet aristocrats and prophets love to bombard us with phantastic new terms like "smart mobs", "the hive mind" and "collective intelligence".  Sounds great! Who doesn’t want to be called smart and be part of a greater (good) collective?

But we currently drowning in blogs, social networks, vertical news portals, tweets, blurbs, clippings and brain farts of the global community. There is more information produced out there than ever before and we have many shiny toys to produce terabytes of it in an alarming speed.

This is the stone age of the information age. Yes, it already has changed the world. Yes, it empowers users. Yes, it overpowers mere mortals constantly.

Blaming the user for not being able to cope with false information, bad software, bad writing, bad web applications and a gazillion new ways to get lost is a cheap excuse by the internet high priests.

Give me proper Search Results or give me Death!

Searching is easy, creating noise is easier

Tools like Google have certainly made it easier to search  for information, but at the same time information itself explodes and becomes more and more watered down.

Constantly more noise is added, but good and strong signals from good senders become rare.

The best way to explain this is to look to the exception of the noise rule: Wikipedia. This site actually tries to "sharpen" the noise and improve the information signal. While Wikipedia tries to focus and concentrate information on a subject gazillions of blogs and tweets dilute it. With each repetition in postings or comments about the very same subject blurs the "concentrate".

And since copy & paste & edit is so easy these days, information gets bend, cut and stretched in any way we want it too. From small time blogger to Stephen Colbert truthiness is in the rise.

Do electric Sheep dream of Google?

Digital Democracy will ruin Knowledge

Knowledge and the truth (or so called facts) is not a democratic process. Repeating half-truths and lies won’t make them true. Advertising works that way, but solid facts don’t.

The really terrible effect of the noise is that search engines rank information mostly by popularity, not by actual fact checking. So "truthiness" can overpower facts by numbers and popularity.

For mere mortals the amount of noise he finds with a simple Google search is staggering. Anyone using a search engine "trusts" the search result (more or less) and accepts the top link as "true" and "valid".

With several hundred or thousand search results how can the searcher make the right "selection" to make sure he doesn’t fall for noise instead what he really wants?

We’ll find it for you master!

Robot Selection by popularity instead of facts

The search engine has already made that selection for you and ranked each information. So you would assume that the machines selection is correct, right? How many people click all links Google throws at you, cross checks each one with other results and THEN make your selection?

In our polluted information landscape machines do the work of collecting information, sorting and ranking it. When we ask we get the "right" selection based on the machines algorithm and cross referencing.

It takes a human and a lot of time to really drill down to facts and sources – and verify information.

Just because a thousand blogs repeat a signal doesn’t make it true, when the information is false. The repetition of UNCHECKED information / news is fast and merciless. Worst of all, there is often no retraction or deletion of false comments and postings. It’s information dirt and noise that will be sucked up by search engines regardless of their degrading truthiness.

Of course Santa is real! All the kids and shops say so every December …

Trusted Networks are stupid as well

Many Information Nerds love to propagate the not so new idea of "trusted networks": social chains, sites, people and blogs that are trustworthy information aggregators.

But just because someone has a popular blog or many followers on Twitter doesn’t make him/her a truthful sender. Once again there is no truth in numbers, nor safety against noise.

The beloved network effect is rather dangerous, since it aggregates and spreads information extremely fast. And once again corrections or retraction are hard to accomplish. Who cares about yesterdays tweets or postings – and make the extra effort to fact check all the noise that comes your way.

Stop the noise!

Shouting Match

The only way to correct "false noise" is to have "louder true noise". But information noise is by definition and in practical terms always a dilution, because even when people faithfully copy information they usually add some of their own bits and comments, that may pollute the original "signal".

Only a few sites like Wikipedia actively correct and more important delete false information. Most bloggers, tweeters, even the respectable BBC leaves old articles on the web.

That is simply information pollution. More work for search engines and humans alike to drill down to facts.

Machines don’t forget nor forgive.

Conclusion

Bad book run out of print, when nobody buys them. Bad information usually faded over time, because it was useless. But on the intranets information hardly dies and fades away. It’s one of the curses of the digital age that everything can be saved in excellent quality forever.

We need new mechanism to label good information. A selection and recommendation by numbers and machines is not good enough. And even the popular vote by humans is not good enough either.

We still need our experts in contrast to all that babble about "smart mobs", "the hive mind" and "collective intelligence". Because a thousand non-experts are not a substitute for the knowledge of Quantum Physics Professor – when it comes to Quantum Physics.

Sorting and improving information should be a global community effort, but not guided by numbers or majority vote (or noise).