too much info

I could be wrong, though, as I’m not really a reader of blogs. I have a hard enough time keeping up with the book review sections of the New York and Los Angeles Times, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Bookforum, the Atlantic, Harper’s, TLS, the New Republic, etc., as well as the British newspapers like the Guardian and Independent, which I read online. Yet even in those publications I often find that the pieces I’m excited to be reading are the exception rather than the rule. I’m all for cultural gatekeepers because there’s way more out there than I have time to read and it’s not always easy to find the best of it.

From Death of Criticism - salon.com

This is a great article about the death of serious literary criticism in newspapers by at the moment and the current trend towards democratisation thanks to amazon etc. It’s not at all ideological and provides a balanced look at the effect the Internet is having on declining newspaper purchases.

That being said, that phrase really stood out for me because it’s one which heaps of people parrot incessantly without much cause for thought. It’s the classic, ‘the Internet’s has way too much information OMG I can’t keep up!!!!’ argument and after much thought I don’t think it holds up.

It’s true that the internet has the potential to hold an infinite amount of information, that’s why it’s more beneficial for knowledge storing than a bookstore or a library, there’s no actual physical restrictions. However what phrases like this seem to ignore is the awesome searchability of the Internet.

…it’s not always easy to find the best of it.

This is a phrase which is becoming increasingly worn out. Amazon has an amazing recommendations system, it’s only recently that we’ve had a search engine like Google, with an algorithm so awesome and powerful that they have to feed it four times daily so it doesn’t turn loose and destroy the world, and we’re currently in the midst of a meta-revolution where everything can be tagged, ranked and filtered a thousand times over to serve anybody’s searching purposes.

This ‘too much information’ argument stopped holding weight for me when I went second hand book shopping yesterday. It was a sizable store in Carlton and there were two levels packed to the roof with books. My first thought? I’m never going to get through all this. Apart from the vague categories which books had been lumped in together, there was no guide as to which books were good, which were horrible, which classics were good classics for people like me who enjoyed Oscar Wilde but hated anything by the Bronte sisters. In actual fact, in this bookstore there was too much information and no way to sort it! I still enjoyed getting lost in a bookstore for two hours, it was awesome. But it destroyed the oft repeated fiction that somehow information was easier to find offline. If anything the better search techniques available online have just augmented the information we previously had access too.

Sure we might not read it all, but I think if we’re talking about cultural gatekeepers, I’d trust amazon after using it for a year just as much as Peter Craven.

This guy explains this much better in his book, everything is miscellaneous.