With the arrival of digital technology, we’ve become a nation “of multitaskers, snackers and samplers,” says Jonathan Miller . A longtime player in the media industry, Miller perceives two distinct trends emerging: the fragmentation of consumption, due to “an incredible explosion of choice,” and the consolidation of money and power in the business.
These intertwined phenomena will continue to play out, Miller believes, “to the consumers’ benefit,” because to a large degree, the consumer is in control. Content is available across innumerable platforms, from cell phones to laptops to handheld games, and with broadband and wireless penetration, users can get their fix of news, entertainment and data virtually anywhere, anytime. More to the point, consumers have at their command cheap and easy ways to produce and distribute their own content, whether original or freely exploited from other authors. There’s been a grassroots explosion of blogs, websites, mashups, instant messaging, and YouTubing. Miller notes that the internet served up five billion screens of video in 2002, and in the past year, five times as many.
The program runs 51 minutes and was recorded on September 27, 2006.
Source: MIT
Btw, we completely agree with the blurb from MIT that describes the event:
Miller discusses the explosion in media content: more choices, more venues, more technology platforms, but still only 24 hours in the day.
A well-trained information professional offers many skills, tools, and abilities to their job. However, one concept that can get us in the door (you can't talk about any of our skills until your inside), is our ability to save the end user time by providing them with the information they need, the skills they need to do it on their own, or just knowledge that the tools they may need are available. Yes, their are only 24 hours in the day but info pros can make people users more efficient with that time. Don't forget the Accenture study from earlier this year that said managers in the work place said the majority of information obtained for their work Is useless. A well-trained info pro can do a lot to help make this belief false.
A family of resources to help information workers be more effective, raise the value of information in their organisations and contribute to success. Read more »
Recently I have found myself cooing over visualisation maps (and heat maps) of health and well being resources. The content rich data is overlayed with mapping technologies, and some interesting themes and patterns are emerging.
A lot of the talk around social media in the last year has been around information overload. Social media has provided us with new and exciting ways to create content. But it has also meant learning new ways to manage and engage with social media tools. Are we teetering on the edge of an information overload precipice?
Information overload is a figment of your imagination. Or a failure of your filter. Or a symptom of your technological submissiveness. Depends on who you ask.
What if you had to sort through 3.5 million articles and social media posts a day and try to pull out the most relevant items for your organisation? What if you then had to cobble it all together into something readable for your top groups and executives in your organisation?
Alacra Compliance saves time by aggregating information from both free and fee-based sources and enabling users to conduct an accurate federated search across these sources (coined “simultaneous search” by Alacra).
FreePint Family
Quilting big data threads
The fallacy of information overload
Information overload: fact, fantasy or filter failure? 
