A great video featuring Clay Shirky, check it out!

It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure.

Shirky talks about how the economic solution used to be simpler. The publishers were responsible for selecting good content, placing filters for quality firmly in place, to ensure that people would watch/read the content, be it in television shows, movies, books or other forms. This would justify the huge investment typically put in by the content publishers.

In a post Gultenburg economy, all that has changed. The cost of publishing has been lowered dramatically, close to zero with push button publishing, user made videos and easy dissemination on the internet. The filter for quality essentially vanished.

Filters and more
This might be to filter outbound content – how do we manage our privacy settings (something that we are not accustomed to)? It also relates to filtering inbound flow, there is no better example than email spam and how we can keep it out of our inboxes.

Right now, filtering does not always occur at the source where information is distributed. There seem to be no obvious tools in place yet, but we are slowly getting there.

We have sites and portals that aggregate the news and conversations from both mainstream media and citizen journalists, from both group conversations and individual efforts, for services like Twitter and RSS feeds. The most recent example – Facebook’s soon to be released new homepage looks to have a strong emphasis on a system of filters to prioritize updates from your contacts as the information levels increase.

The issue then, is not so much that a huge amount of information has always been there, far more than humanly possible for a single individual to singularly posses.

What we apparently need then, as suggested, is a good system of filters.