I'm hyper on information!

Many of us, well at least I say this, "I am a gauntlet of useless information." I know a little about a lot of may different things. Why? The internet and the constant and instantaneous access to information. I will have to admit that like Michael Ridley says, I do not always process the information that I come across. I just store it and have the information take up space in my head.

I think that Plato was onto something when he said that our memory would be diminished by technology, which for him was writing and literacy. It is true, apparently we remember 50% less now than we did in the Shakespearian times. I read that somewhere, how's that for useless information that is now relevant! Actually a friend told me that...

This is how I feel on information overload!

We are constantly being told to memorize this, don't forget that, no wonder we are on information overload! We live in an instant gratification society. To some degree I don't think that is that we can't remember as well as we once did, but that there is so much more information to know. As a high school student I never saw the point in memorizing certain factoids, but I knew why I remembered others (most multiplication facts). I always was bull headed and would think if I ever went into a field, chemistry or history what have you, I could always look up the information that I needed.

“Long-form thinking looks the way its does because books shaped it that way. And because books have been knowledge’s medium, we have thought that that’s how knowledge should be shaped … But now that our medium can handle far more ideas and information, and now that it is a connective medium (ideas to ideas, people to ideas, people to people), our strategy is changing. And that is changing the very shape of knowledge.”

I do not think that I could say this better than how David Weinberger did in Too Big To Know (2011). We are still teaching and trying to be literate to what was the cutting edge years ago. We are moving into a newer age of literacy, the 2.0 alphabet, where knowledge is changing and how we access and learn is too. Knowledge today is not what it was even 10 years ago. We have finally surpassed what our brains are capable of, but we do not know how to harness what we have created and synthesize all of that information.