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On a podcast today, Mitch Joel asked me something I don’t think anyone else has: Are we experiencing information overload? Everyone else assumes that we are. Including me. I found myself answering no, we are not. There is of course a reasonable and valid reason to say that we are. But I think there’s also an important way in which we are not. So, here goes:
There are more things to see in the world than any one human could ever see. Some of those sights are awe-inspiring. Some are life-changing. Some would bring you peace. Some would spark new ideas. But you are never going to see them all. You can’t. There are too many sights to see. So, are you suffering from Sight Overload?
There are more meals than you could ever eat. Some are sooo delicious, but you can’t live long enough to taste them all. Are you suffering from Taste Overload?
Or, you’re taking a dip in the ocean. The water extends to the horizon. Are you suffering from Water Overload? Or are you just having a nice swim?
That’s where I think we are with information overload. Of course there’s more than we could ever encounter or make sense of. Of course. But it’s not Information Overload any more than the atmosphere is Air Overload.
It only seems that way if you think you can master information, or if you think there is some defined set of information you can and must have, or if you find yourself repeating the mantra of delivering the right information to the right people at the right time, as if there were any such thing.
Information overload is so 1990s.
My friend AKMA has posted part I of his research and reflections into the “Old Testament” writings about death. AKMA is a friend, and a truly learned, open-minded, and open-hearted theologian. It’s fascinating watching him doing his preliminary research, sorting through the death references from within his Christian frame, although AKMA being AKMA, he’s mainly pointing out ways the Jewish testament does not support the Christian testament’s ideas about death; AKMA is carefully avoiding (I believe) the assumption that Christianity completes the Jewish beginning.
Even so, as I read his thoughtful interpretation, I was struck by how differently he proceeds than would my orthodox Jewish friends (one of whom is my wife :). They’re learned scholars as well, and they of course at times traverse the testament to find all the references to a topic under discussion. But the next step is different. My orthodox friends understand the text only in conversation with the tradition of great scholars — rabbis — who are interpreting the text. It wouldn’t occur to them to try to understand the text apart from that great conversation. Of course AKMA also understands the text through the interpretations that surround it; he is, after all, an extremely well-versed scholar. But it’s different. For the Jews, the rabbinic conversation is, essentially, a part of the text.
And, it’s worth pointing out that that interpretative tradition is fully embraced as unresolved. The rabbis disagree, and this is a good thing. A scholarly discussion that does not point out and defend the disputations has failed. Thus, the tradition is self-contradictory. But, my orthodox friends bridle at that phrase because when you call something self-contradictory, you usually mean to say that it’s flawed; at least one of the sides needs to be rejected, or you need to mystically embrace the paradox. For orthodox scholars, to reject one of the great sources would be to lessen the tradition. And mystically accepting all sides would end the perpetual argument that in a real sense is Judaism. Rather, it’s accepted that we humans are not up to the task of finally understanding the world or the G-d that created it. But we are commanded to keep trying. So, we need as many learned points of view as possible, and we especially need to understand them in their very disagreement. The Jewish understanding of its eternal text is the continuing contentious discussion.
This divergence of argument occurs on the basis of agreement about an unchanging text. We’ve been given an original text that stays literally the same; its letters are copied from one text to another with error-checking procedures that keep the sequences of letters quite reliable. But the text does not speak for itself. It needs to be read and interpreted. That interpretation cannot be accomplished by an individual or even by a community. It requires a history: a set of conversations within the community, arguing about the text across time and circumstance. Thus, an unchanging text can remain relevant because its meaning is not apart from or behind the interpretation, but is in the history of interpretation by an argumentative community.
The perpetual argument is driven by a need to resolve questions of behavior: how the Law is to be applied to a particular dilemma. What constitutes sufficiently koshering an oven when you move into a new apartment? Your rabbi rules, citing text, tradition and its interpreters. The rabbi one synagogue over might well rule differently. That’s ok. That’s how it works: local rabbis refer to a contentious set of interpreters operating from a single text, following rules of argument and evidence. This ties the community to a continuous tradition and an eternal text, while allowing for progressively relevant interpretation and for a multiplicity that enables Jews to not only to live with disagreement, but to flourish within it.
AKMA has written brilliantly about the diversity of interpretation as reflected through his own commitment: differential hermeneutics , and also here and here, among other places. This is a difference in traditions that is reflected in differences in interpretative practices. It is a difference we should embrace.
[Disclosure: I am a non-observant, agnostic Jew. There is no chance that I have gotten the above right.]
My friend Jacob Meskin read a draft of this and has been very helpful, as have several other people, none of whom entirely agree with what I’ve written. Jacob passed along the following from Levinas:
“The Revelation as calling to the unique within me is the significance particular to the signifying of the Revelation. It is as if the multiplicity of persons — is not this the very meaning of the personal? — were the condition for the plenitude of ‘absolute truth’; as if every person, through his uniqueness, were the guarantee of the revelation of a unique aspect of truth, and some of its points would never have been revealed if some people had been absent from mankind. This is not to say that truth is acquired anonymously in History, and that it finds ‘supporters’ in it! On the contrary, it is to suggest that the totality of the true is constituted from the contribution of multiple people: the uniqueness of each act of listening carrying the secret of the text; the voice of the Revelation, as inflected, precisely, by each person’s ear, would be necessary to the ‘Whole’ of the truth. That the Word of the living God may be heard in diverse ways does not mean only that the Revelation measures up to those listening to it, but that this measuring up measures up the Revelation: the multiplicity of irreducible people is necessary to the dimensions of meaning; the multiple meanings are multiple people. We can thus see the whole impact of the reference made by the Revelation to exegesis, to the freedom of this exegesis, the participation of the person listening to the Word making itself heard, but also the possibility for the Word to travel down the ages to announce the same truth in different times.” [ From “Revelation in the Jewish Tradition” (1977), in Beyond The Verse, trans. Gary D. Mole, Indiana University Press, 1994, pp.133-134]
Jacob points out that Levinas is saying this within a context that assumes a tradition of revered rabbinic commentators who are touchstones for the conversation. Without that understanding, this particular passage could lead one to think that Jews feel free to interpret any which way they want. No, our argument has bounds.
Categories: culture, too big to know Tagged with: 2b2k • akma • hermeneutics • judaism • theology Date: March 7th, 2012 dw
This week’s Berkman Buzz
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Ethan Zuckerman explores civic video [link]
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Berkman & the MIT Center for Civic Media examine “truthiness” [link]
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danah boyd announces The Kinder & Braver World Project: Research Series [link]
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Mayo Fuster Morell reports on the OWS Forum on the commons [link]
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The Internet & Democracy Project releases new paper on Internet’s impact on Russian politics, media, and society [link]
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Zambia: Ban Ki-moon Calls on Nation to Respect Gay Rights [link]
Categories: berkman Tagged with: berkman • buzz Date: March 3rd, 2012 dw
Edward Jenner is credited as the discoverer — or perhaps inventor would be the more apt word — of vaccination as a technique to prevent smallpox. That’s pretty much all that I knew, except for the story about milkmaids who got cowpox not getting smallpox. But I just read a really interesting article about the history of small pox at the National Institute of Health, by Stefan Riedel.
“TIL” is Reddit-speak for “Today I learned.” And today I also learned that “As early as 430 BC, survivors of smallpox were called upon to nurse the afflicted” in order to protect them. Today I also learned that “Inoculation…was likely practiced in Africa, India, and China long before the 18th century, when it was introduced to Europe.” And today I also learned that “It was the continued advocacy of the English aristocrat Lady Mary Wortley Montague that was responsible for the introduction of variolation [inoculation] in England.”
Categories: science, too big to know Tagged with: 2b2k • science • smallpox • til Date: March 2nd, 2012 dw
A friend of mine, Evelyn Walsh, sent me a link to Greg Cole‘s site. He has a bunch of cool ideas that live somewhere between art and science, with a bunch of politics percolating through. Finality is kaleidoscopic trip through the Japanese subway system. Ad Shades eliminate outdoor advertising from your vision, and Identity Flash eliminates your image from photos as they are taken.
There’s more. Poke around.
Categories: culture Tagged with: art • innovation Date: March 1st, 2012 dw
Leadereview has posted an interview (mp3) with me from a few nights ago. I thought they asked great questions.
Categories: too big to know Tagged with: 2b2k • leadership • podcast Date: March 1st, 2012 dw
Google has posted my authors@google talk. Thank you, Google!
And Steve Hargadon has posted the hour interview he did last night as part of his Future of Education series, in which we talked about knowledge and education. Thank you, Steve Hargadon!
Categories: education, too big to know Tagged with: 2b2k • education • google • steve hargadon Date: March 1st, 2012 dw
Seth Godin reports that the Apple store is refusing to carry his new book:
I just found out that Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) is rejecting my new manifesto Stop Stealing Dreams and won’t carry it in their store because inside the manifesto are links to buy the books I mention in the bibliography.
Quoting here from their note to me, rejecting the book: “Multiple links to Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) store…
We’re heading to a world where there are just a handful of influential bookstores (Amazon, Apple, Nook…) and one by one, the principles of open access are disappearing. Apple, apparently, won’t carry an ebook that contains a link to buy a hardcover book from Amazon.
Seth is properly nervous about imposing demands on private companies about what they will or will not carry. But he finds what I think is the right argument in this case. first, the online marketplace for books simply as a matter of fact is dominated by three players: Apple, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble. This dominance imposes particular responsibilities for keeping such a crucial enabler of our culture open. Second, the vertical integration of this market — the dominate sellers of ebook hardware are also the dominant sellers of ebooks — imposes a similar cultural obligation.
Seth concludes:
I think that Amazon and Apple and B&N need to take a deep breath and make a decision on principle: what’s inside the book shouldn’t be of concern to a bookstore with a substantial choke on the marketplace. If it’s legal, they ought to let people read it if they choose to.
(PS: It is genuinely irrelevant that the example of a book Seth was linking to is Too Big to Know. Although it pleases me to be linked to by Seth :)
Categories: culture, net neutrality Tagged with: books • ebooks Date: February 29th, 2012 dw
Sebastian Benthall has a fervent post about the need for open networks in science, inspired by an awesome talk by the awesome Victoria Stodden.
Along the way, he offers a correction (or extension, perhaps) of a point that I make in 2b2k: the next Darwin is likely to develop her work within an open network that add values to her work. In some real sense the knowledge lives in that network. Sebastian responds:
He’s right, except maybe for one thing, which is that this digital dialectic (or pluralectic) implies that “the next Darwin” isn’t just one dude, Darwin, with his own ‘-ism’ and pernicious Social adherents. Rather, it means that the next great theory of the origin of species is going to be built by a massive collaborative effort in which lots of people will take an active part. The historical record will show their contributions not just with the clumsy granularity of conference publications and citations, but with minute granularity of thousands of traced conversations. The theory itself will probably be too complicated for any one person to understand, but that’s OK, because it will be well architected and there will be plenty of domain experts to go to if anyone has problems with any particular part of it. And it will be growing all the time and maybe competing with a few other theories.
I love the point.
(Nit: I want to clarify, however, that I wasn’t saying that this next Darwin’s web would consist only of “pernicious Social adherents.” Throughout 2b2k I try to make the point that networked knowledge has value mainly because it includes difference and disagreement. When it does not, it fulfills the nightmare of the echo chamber.)
EconTalk has posted an hour interview with me by Russ Roberts about some of the topics in Too Big to Know that don’t come up so often.
Categories: podcast, too big to know Tagged with: 2b2k • facts • podcast Date: February 27th, 2012 dw
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