Week 3 Readings
Although I can relate to issues with too much, irrelevant, or inaccurate data on the internet that were described in Nelson’s article “We Have the Information You Want, But Getting It Will Cost You: Being Held Hostage by Information Overload,” I don’t think that there is too much information on the internet. There is information about nearly every subject, and every aspect of each subject, but each bit of that knowledge must be valuable to someone at sometime. I believe that since our generation has been doing research online for so long, we have developed an ability to sift through the volumes of information available to us. It takes extra time, but I think this is a necessary evil. At times the amount of information on the internet can be overwhelming, but with increasingly effective search engines and knowledge about sources which are consistently reliable, the volumes of information can be picked through much more simply. As Nelson says, “a person should know what tools are available and how to use them.” I definitely believe this is the key to managing the massive amounts of information out there.
This idea correlates effectively with the second article, “Information Overload, Retrieval Strategies and Internet User Empowerment” by Christopher N. Carlson. Carlson laid out the different search engines and sifting methods very plainly, in a helpful format. I liked that Carlson portrayed the information overload as: “the logical result of a free information market coupled with technological progress,” (p. 1) instead of implying that the masses of information are something bad. I thought it was interesting that he included spam emails as one source of information overload online as well because I hadn’t considered that aspect before (p.3-4). I see the internet as a great resource despite the intimidating amounts of information it contains. Although Carlson’s article is somewhat lengthy in itself, I think it has some extremely useful tips and insights.
Discussion Questions:
Are the volumes of information online more of a necessary evil, or a time consuming aggravation factor?
When searching for information online, do you have a specific way of going about it? Do you depend on one search site, or a newspaper source, for instance?
Have you bought/would you buy any programs to help you sift through information online?
Ha the internet naturally increased our ability to search quickly through information to find what we’re looking for?
This idea correlates effectively with the second article, “Information Overload, Retrieval Strategies and Internet User Empowerment” by Christopher N. Carlson. Carlson laid out the different search engines and sifting methods very plainly, in a helpful format. I liked that Carlson portrayed the information overload as: “the logical result of a free information market coupled with technological progress,” (p. 1) instead of implying that the masses of information are something bad. I thought it was interesting that he included spam emails as one source of information overload online as well because I hadn’t considered that aspect before (p.3-4). I see the internet as a great resource despite the intimidating amounts of information it contains. Although Carlson’s article is somewhat lengthy in itself, I think it has some extremely useful tips and insights.
Discussion Questions:
Are the volumes of information online more of a necessary evil, or a time consuming aggravation factor?
When searching for information online, do you have a specific way of going about it? Do you depend on one search site, or a newspaper source, for instance?
Have you bought/would you buy any programs to help you sift through information online?
Ha the internet naturally increased our ability to search quickly through information to find what we’re looking for?
posted by Jessica H COM 300 @ 2:27 PM
1 Comments:
At 11:18 PM,
Jarrod's Blog said…
Stephanie-
Sorry, but I have to disagree with your stance on the position taken in Dr. Nelson’s article. I would have to agree with Dr. Nelson that there most certainly is a ton of useless information on the Internet. As he points out large volumes of data are fraught with inconsistencies and errors. When you have two different sources claiming factual information, obviously one source is not correct, and wouldn’t you agree this would make that information useless, and not of value to anyone at anytime? Another thing to consider is information being added to the Internet by people who are purposely, adding irrelevant words to trick crawlers into indexing their sites, framing stories for a political or personal agenda, and outright lying and committing fraud to further there own personal gain, not very useful information. Still, Another more morally based question to ponder: does information although, useful to some people, when being used to propagate discrimination or harm against others still classify as useful information?
I will agree with you that there are, especially through academic portals, much better access to consistently reliable sources for credible information. I do not however, think that it should be a necessary evil to waste time sifting through tons of journals and other scholarly information, be as it may accurate and credible in the factual sense, if it is nevertheless useless for your purposes. Why should we accept having to waste, the most valuable asset of all, time? Doesn’t this limit the potential for building upon useful information, ideas and concepts? Negate the chances for creating and becoming something greater than we are? Or at the very least, eliminate the most effective utilization of information in meeting our deadlines? How can we hope for this if we are wasting the majority of our time searching for needles in haystacks, as it were?
If we accept this then we will never truly structure and yield the potential benefits that truly utilizing this exponential minefield of "useful" information that currently lies at our fingertips. We need to see beyond what we know the Internet to be, think outside the box. What could it be? What true power lies in the ability to efficiently build upon ideas and concepts? Think of the Bush article, we now have access to ideas, concepts and research that in prior generations would have taken a lifetime to accumulate and put together. What could be accomplished by structuring and making this process even more efficient? Knowledge is power? No, simply having knowledge, without having the ability to process and utilize it deems it nothing more than clutter. And isn’t this the very proposition, Dr. Nelson is asserting?
I agree with Dr. Nelson, that the greatest crisis modern civilization is facing is the puzzle of how to transform all this information into truly structured knowledge. The ability to truly structure, and access information efficiently, by individuals and societies that are striving for advancements that benefit the evolution of humanity is quite possibly key in the very survival of humanity itself, and there within lies the hope for a better tomorrow, a utopia.
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