Filter Failure

>Clay Shirky suggests that there’s **no such thing as information overload, only filter failure.** This is a very modern response to an older question. Futurist Alvin Toffler warned us about information overload, popularizing the phrase. It’s an extension of the idea of sensory overload, the idea that too much input could overwhelm and paralyze you. This is based on the faulty assumption that brains are information processing machines, and that we can overwhelm and crash them. …

>Knowledge is too big, messy and wildly unsettled, just like the internet. “For every fact on the internet, there is an equal and opposite fact.” David [Weinberger] warns that there is nothing we all agree on – you can find someone willing to argue that 2+2 is not 4 (and, indeed, a quick Google search shows this to be true.) **We don’t agree about anything, and David warns, we never will. “This doesn’t mean there are no facts – but it does mean that people are going to insist on being wrong.”** …

>“Networked knowledge may or may not be truer about the world, but is is truer about knowing… This crazy approach to knowledge feels familiar to us, because it’s how we tend to know.” [Weinberger] closes with an observation that’s both hopeful and unsettling: **“What we have in common is a shared world about which we disagree, not a common knowledge we share and can collectively come to.”**

— snippets from [Ethan Zuckerman’s](http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2012/01/26/david-weinberger-too-big-to-know/) heroic liveblogging during the book launch of [Too Big to Know](http://www.toobigtoknow.com/) by David Weinberger.

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