A flood of Information
This topic is bothering me personally every day I use the internet.
With the invention of the Internet, we have been plugged into an enormous Datapool. The hierarchy of quality in this datapool is mostly not very well defined. It is the wild west out there.
Most of us seasoned voyagers of the digital cloud pool probably have a few selected bays in this ocean of information, that they like to visit frequently. This choice, at least for me has been made, because these places are a shelter of quality content, that also is reliably well managed, so that the place does not fall prey to chaos.
On Steemit...
Now with steemit it is a bit difficult for me. So far it is like the Wild West. Everyday I stumble upon new authors or articles that seem promising to read, but at the same time, I see articles with poor editing, or non-original content. At the same time I need to invest some of the time I spend on steemit to manage my account, my content, my votes and so on.
Now I want to bring this situation into context, of what I deem a reasonable relation to information and time spent consuming it.
How valuable is information?
Personally, after being a book and information geek for most of my life, I find more and more, that most everything that really matters to my life I already have access to without opening a book or a tab in my browser. Then again, I also believe that humans have evolved to gather information, process it and create (or channel) novelty. This is one of our accomplishments.
On the other hand, I notice the trend, because of the overwhelming amount of information available, that I tend to only skim through texts rather then read word for word. This comes out of the feeling of never being able to finish reading everything interesting out there.
Steemit is a platform that rewards curating lots of content. However with the quantity of content we should review, it is more likely that we dont actually let, what the author is saying, sink into our mind deeply. This is a pity, because a lot of people poor their heartblood into their articles, and even though people comment, alot probably dont really read the whole text. How do I know?
Because Ive been guilty of the behaviour myself. It is something that bothers me in my own behaviour, and prompted me to write this article. I hope to better my behaviour in this context.
Future?
Apart from the personal impact of this topic, I want to use the last lines to put the focus again on to the challenge we as human species are handed, in finding ways in the future to adapt to these massive amounts of information.
If you know any other steemers, or interesting authors on other platforms that wrote quality insights on the this topic let me know in the comments.