Too much information?

Chris Pirillo says:

The problem today isn’t that there’s not enough information. There’s too much. It’s not there aren’t ways to publish content on the Internet - there are an abundance. A lot of noise comes with that signal. So we’ve got different problems than we used to have. Information used to be handed to us from “on high”, as recently as a decade ago. Nowadays, information is just literally everywhere. It’s overwhelming at times. It’s impossible for me to keep up with the news aggregator, the email, the social networks…

Where does it end? How do you keep up with this information overload?

Here was my comment:

Interesting topic!

Perhaps it only seems like “overload” to the degree in which you are trying to “keep up.” People just growing up with the Internet now, and its vast resources, will probably be so used to there being so much information available that they won’t feel overloaded at all.

As for how to sift through all that information to find what you need, I agree that that will be a human role for many years to come. Humans are already helping to sort out all the information with sites like Digg and Wikipedia. Even a site like this is in some ways a “Pirillo Information Filter” as it contains information you gathered and filtered yourself.

I think with blogs and podcasts and sites like Digg and Twitter and YouTube, we may no longer even have to put any extra effort into “keeping up” … the important information will emerge from these resources to us.