You can see it on Twitter every day, a year and a half after he coined it: Clay Shirky’s famous Filter Failure meme,
“It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure”.
It’s catchy. It’s thought-provoking. And yet, I believe, it’s also misleading.
This meme started with an excellent keynote Clay gave at Web 2.0 Expo NY in late 2008, and I strongly recommend you watch the video if you haven’t already: it’s very insightful and interesting. If you’re too overloaded to spend 23 minutes, some of the ideas are also in a CJR interview here.
To sum it up, Clay says Information Overload is not new; it’s been around since antiquity, and really took off with Gutenberg’s printing press. But in the print era, a publisher had to filter what to publish, because it cost them up front and might not sell; this filtered the available information at the source. The Internet introduced “Post-Gutenberg economics”: it’s now possible to publish anything for free, so the filter is gone. Therefore, there is no such thing as information overload, there’s only filter failure, which we should solve by developing new and better filtering paradigms.
Which makes a lot of sense, except that I’ve spent the past 15 years of my professional life helping knowledge workers who are driven to distraction by a very obvious and real affliction they call Information Overload. So how can Mr. Shirky, a leading expert, say it’s not even a problem?
On one level, it may just be a logical error: just because A is caused by B doesn’t mean that A isn’t a real problem. The Black Death was caused by flea-carrying rats; yet no one would say “It wasn’t a terrible plague, it was a pest-control failure”. It was a very real plague caused by failure to kill the rats; and Information Overload is a very real problem caused (in part) by Filter Failure.
More importantly, I think Clay and I define “Information Overload” – the “It” in the meme – differently. As he states in the CJR article, “[having] more information in one place than one human being could deal with in one lifetime… is almost the definition of information overload”. If this is the definition, then I agree it isn’t a problem – and certainly not THE problem – at all. Who cares if there’s a lot of information in a library, as long as you don’t have to read it all?
The problem of Information Overload as I see it, the one that’s robbing millions of people of their productivity, sanity and quality of life, is definitely new, going back to the proliferation of email in the nineties. It is not that there’s a lot of information; it is that there’s a lot more information that we are expected to read than we have time to read it in. It’s about the dissonance between that requirement and our ability to comply with it, and this requirement was not there in Alexandria or in Gutenberg’s Europe: you were free to read only what you wanted to and had time for. This is what has changed, not just the filtering. Take email: the real problem isn’t spam, which is easily dealt with; it’s the scores or hundreds of work-related messages you receive each day, and the fact that replying intelligently to even the fraction that is really important forces many to work late into the night, 7 days a week. This is an intensely real nightmare for managers, engineers, and many others. And this is why Email Overload is a problem and RSS feed overload is much less so: there is an expectation (express or implied) that you must go through all the mail in your Inbox; there is no such expectation for an RSS reader.
That said, is this problem caused by Filter Failure? To some extent it is: when you had to stuff your mimeographed interoffice memos in envelopes, the inconvenience was a filter; when you got your reprints on paper from the company librarian, that too was a filter. The Reply to All button is a major filter-buster. However, I perceive other causes, as you readers of my blog know. In particular, there are cultural reasons for the abundance of workplace email: CYA, publish or perish, mistrust, escalation, and so on.
So if Clay is simply talking about the “OMG there are so many publications out there I will never read” kind of IO, while I am talking of the “I will never clear this Inbox in time to take my kid to the game” kind, why do I take issue with him? I do so because stating “there is no such thing as information overload” does not make that distinction; it makes it sound like all the people who claim they have an IO problem are whiners and luddites. It also reduces the motivation to deal with Information Overload, and this leaks over into “my” kind of IO, where such motivation is highly beneficial to people. And lastly, emphasizing that it’s “only” Filter Failure takes attention away from the many solutions that address IO from other angles, such as understanding and changing the underlying workplace culture. Which Clay himself would probably welcome, since he concludes the lecture with the statement that we will need to rethink social norms to fix the issue. Amen to that!
What do you think?
Articulate, thoughtful, and powerful — as always, Nathan. Thank you for this post. (I’ll probably link to it for my own post later!)
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
I agree that Shirky`s statement leads to definition of Information Overload where E-Mail Management or messages in general need another point of view.
There still is high potential for helpful technical solutions to filter messages. Not only detecting spam but also ordering and analyzing relevant content. Machine learning algorithms showed promising results.
Of course this can only be part of the solution and probably never work fully automated. Shirky did not talk about this. Like you said, there are other approaches, like the culture of communication in a company.
This is targeting the creation of messages/information. Other examples are trainings and rules for better communication.
Effective information work needs to take this different approaches into account. Optimizing your filters is good but won`t solve it.
Nathan,
Good post. I think part of the solution to the problem is to move some of the filtering back to the source – i.e. the person sending the email. I don’t mean spam (which can be handled by filters), but business related email that you received that isn’t really urgent (or even meant for you). That is why I discussed the notion of “business class” email – like regular emails but with more built in mechanisms for management and monitoring of a conversation (or process).
Business email is a bit more “expensive” for the sender (e.g. in that it can be traced back to them, it is tracked, it takes up space in the sender inbox). A business class email also encapsulates a conversation and is “process related” – it is linked to all the other back-and-forth emails for a certain business process. All these mechanisms make the recepient more confident in the real need (for them) to read that email before they take their kid to game (or not).
My post on the subject is at http://blog.actionbase.com/human-process-management-and-the-email-filter-failure-problem
Jacob Ukelson – CTO ActionBase
Very well reasoning, thoughtful and I have nothing elase but to agree with your point: IO is a real problem.
Good read.
It’s a Darwin world and this is just another test in our information age — survival of the information saviest.
Clay did a very clever thing by shifting from the stimulus to the response (as Covey would say, it’s not what happens to us, it’s how we respond.)
I’ve helped people out of info overload everytime with the following pattern:
– setting objectives (your main filters for what’s relevant)
– prioritizing (your main filter for what’s next, and how much to invest)
– setting limits – time, sizes, and quantity (your main filter for when you’re “done”)
I’m in a particularly tough environment so it’s battle-tested to the extreme cases (it’s Microsoft, where we use email like IM 🙂
There’s lots of ways to filter, but the most important starts with objectives, priorities, and limits.
We can borrow from the military too — the military uses some effective filters such as RAT (relevant, actionable, timely) and the air force uses checklists to avoid task saturation (which leads to compartmentalization, channelizing, or shutting-down.)
Usually the most important thing I help somebody with is actually “managing action.” The single most important thing here is factoring the true “action” items from all the “reference.”
I summarized a simple approach for keeping your inbox empty in “zen of zero mail” (should be the first google hit)
Ahh, J.D., using email like IM is such a common abuse… I see it all over the place. As one company actually measured it, 70% of emails get handled within 6 seconds of arriving in the Inbox. And to think that email used to be such a superb asynchronous tool…
Interesting post…
CYA, reply to all, office politics, etc. are all reasons for information overload. Coupled with insecurity over jobs these days, you can see why everyone’s overdoing it.
While my post isn’t exactly on point (dealing more with pleasure reading than mandatory work stuff), there’s some overlap:
http://www.philsimonsystems.com/blog/writing/misc-writing/tell-me-a-story/
Some things to consider:
– a day still has 24 hours
– data and information are two different things
– quality of information is another thing
– time and priorities are related
– productivity and efficiency are related as well
– the more data, the more information, the more relevant information but also the more irrelevant information
– time spend on irrelevant information is time you cannot spend on relevant information
– availability of information is not the problem, but finding the right kind of information in the fastest way is
– and since the publication of information seems to repeat itself in time in: 1) many ways, 2)via many channels and 3)exponentially. The need for filtering becomes increasingly more important.
Though human brain is very well able to make fast selections, simply by ignoring what is relevant (according to our view) and what is not, you may miss that one article that really brings you one step closer to the thruth.
The single statement I have a small issue with with in your critique of Clay’s article: “it is that there’s a lot more information that we are expected to read than we have time to read it in. ”
This implies that the information has little to do with the information per se, and everything to do with a combination of culture, agreed upon norms and each person’s confidence or self-sovereignty.
In many workplaces, an employee who gives in to the norm to reply-to-all-email-as-soon-as-possible is screwed. To be productive, they (and hopefully others) must realize that the expectation is an unproductive one that must be actively challenged.
Just because it exists… doesn’t mean that it’s to be followed, and I think employees need to be taught that following the norm is not only a bad idea, it’s the perfect recipe for failure. In this sense, employees’ sense of themselves is what needs to change, and that as you rightly say, is deeply cultural as many companies just won’t allow that kind of employee to stick around for long.
Nathan,
Thanks for this piece.
After reading about: It’s not information overload, it’s filter failure – I said okay makes sense – but your piece shed new light into the mix. Making information overload real is the key, with that acknowledged we can address the issues that information overload causes and learn to use filtering as one of the tools for managing all this information.
Warm Regards,
Bill Huey