We are drowning in a sea of information.

It’s a growing torrent that no single person can possibly drink.

In the book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman identifies a turning point in the history of mass communication, the invention of the telegraph. Prior to the telegraph, most of the information people took in was relevant to their lives, and the main way they took in information was through reading it.

With the invention of the telegraph, suddenly people started to be bombarded with information that had no direct bearing on their lives; it neither caused nor required any kind of direct action.

Suddenly people would learn about earthquakes in faraway places and hear of the lives of government officials in other countries, although this gave people a global perspective, at the same time most of the information was just facts, facts that they could not put into action.

Information became a commodity; it was no longer highly valued because it was everywhere, and most of it was irrelevant to people’s daily lives.

To use the title of a book by Thomas Friedman, The World Is Flat: it is more connected and globalized then ever before. Today, an earthquake, in one part of the world can have a direct bearing on the stock market in another part of the world, directly impacting people’s lives.

Now more then ever, it is important to know what is going on around the world and to have an understanding of how to deal with it on both cultural and economic levels.

What Postman is pointing to is the high percentage of information we are confronted with on a daily basis: information that we are not looking for, nor can we do anything with. Even when we find what we are looking for, we may have too much of it to deal with it effectively.

Read the full story:
Information Overload: Blogs As Content Navigators, Information Filters, Trusted Niche Guides

[tags]blogs,independent publishing,communication,long tail,credibility[/tags]