Too much information, thanks
I just don’t need it.
Thanks to transparency, technology, and Web 2.0, I’m informed, included, updated and empowered. I can maximize, optimize, and bastardize. I can crunch mountains of data and mash both up and potatoes.
But I don’t need it.
David Berkowitz hinted as much in his Search Insider column this week (republished on his blog):
My main concern centers on how much control users have over their search experience. Like every other pundit, I love spouting off on how consumers are taking more control over their media experience, but consumers don’t need to control every part of it. Consumers can let others decide when the new Indiana Jones movie hits the theaters, whether “Quarterlife” airs on MySpace or NBC, or how natural search results rank. Media and technology companies can exert their control where it helps.
It’s not a problem exclusive to the Internet. It also applies (with apologies to Dr. Hsien-Hsien Lei) to genetic testing.
Michael Arrington just got his test results back from 23andMe, and they contain a pretty impressive quantity of information. From the sliver he put up on his site (he’ll allow anyone to access the full set of results on his 23andMe account), he can see 49 topics (including ‘Avoidance of Errors’ and ‘Bitter Taste Perception’); for each, he can see the study size, replications, contrary studies, ethnicities, the marker, a description of the trait, and whether you have higher than normal, normal, or lower than normal odds.
Too much information.
An optimistic Arrington commenter suggested the best possible result from all this: “Knowing what diseases you are prone to will help people make changes in their diets, exercise or work habits to make the risk of getting these diseases or conditions even smaller.” Sorry, but it won’t. We all know it’s not good for us to smoke or laze about or eat junk, and yet we still do; intellectual knowledge doesn’t drive behavior change.
What steps are you supposed to take if you find out that you have a lower than normal chance of manifesting 14 traits, a normal chance of manifesting 22 traits, and a higher than normal chance of manifesting 13 traits? What do you do when one trait requires you to eat more tomatoes and the other says you should avoid tomatoes altogether?
What would you do with all that information? Your comments are welcome. In tomorrow’s post, I’ll suggest what I see as the inevitable outcome of the infonami.
March 5th, 2008 at 7:18 am
Darn it. I immediately set off to buy you the domain ‘infomami’ as a gift. Disappointed.
Then I was hopeful and certain your newly coined term ‘infonami’, awash under excessive information, would surely rank at the top of Google. But I was also disappointed that infonami is shunted to position two. A travel site has named a subdirectory /infonami/ to store files about the nation of Namibia. Of all things, a loss on a technicality!
Oh, woe.
March 6th, 2008 at 12:19 am
I’m so glad you appreciated the newly minted term! As I wrote it, I asked my office mates, “What would you think I meant if I said, ‘infonami’?” They said, “An overwhelming overload of information.” An overwhelming overload! Spot on.