Phil Morle has just posted about the information overload and media 2.0 scale issues I have been covering lately and he makes an excellent point:

“We are becoming good filters, but poor philosophers. We are good at information retrieval and storage and not so good at the long-thought. We need machines to become better at filtering media 2.0 - show us the important stuff, let us get into the background stuff if we have the time and let us trust that we aren’t missing anything. We need time to think.” [Emphasis added]

To put it another way, I wonder if we have more information… but less understanding.

Just like 24 hour news networks (who suffer from too much chatter and not enough context), we spend so much time trying to keep up with, comment about and clip/snip/remix everything we may have forgotten how to keep perspective.

Watching Robert Scoble’s presentation about “Living in a Google World” it struck me that he has learned a lot about filtering information for himself. He admits he does a lot of his filtering based on how a post or headline might catch his eye, and also by a learned sense of authority about the author of a post.

It’s great that people like us have time to process all this information and think deeply about information consumption and trends.

But I think most people don’t have time.

Knowledge workers have traditionally had the benefit of analyst reports and high-quality premium data to give them insight into emerging trends.

Now, however, there is a need for them to join the real-time conversation and filter information for themselves. How will this affect their ability to synthesize new ideas and keep their eye on long-term opportunities?

I fear most people will end up in a reactive echo-chamber world with very little original thought because they are too busy just trying to keep up. Or maybe that’s nothing new?

I’d like to think there is a better way…

Being from Australia, we often discuss internally the advantages and disadvantages of being in the Valley.

Having just come back from there, I can tell you it is an amazing place with an amazing group of people. In fact, I am considering moving there.

The down side though, is that when you are in a tight nit group of people, you can often get trapped in groupthink.

Tara from Citizen Agency has a great post about “Why Smart People Defend Dumb Ideas” where point 2 is what she calls “Circle Jerk” or ‘Echo Chamber Thinking’.

The are many other interesting points on the list so check it out.

Now if I can only control my egotistical need to be right.