Professional epidemic: Information Overload and how to fight back
Not every epidemic is one that harms your body. There are some epidemics that attack your mind, the way you think, and what you base your decisions on.
Sounds scary, right?
Beware, as a professional marketer, you aren’t immune. There’s a chance that you have already fallen victim to one of these nefarious epidemics of the mind — Information Overload.
When your desire for continuous learning meets the brick wall of the Information Overload
Maybe you haven’t heard it called Information Overload, but you have probably experienced its symptoms.
In plain terms:
Information overload (also known as infobesity or infoxication) is a term used to describe the difficulty of understanding an issue and effectively making decisions when one has too much information about that issue.
What does this mean? Today’s professionals, including marketing professionals, are drowning in excess information. According to Mark Schaefer’s article on Content Shock published in 2014, the amount of available web-based content doubles every 9 to 24 months. Four years later, the content marketing industry continues to thrive and the amount of content available online continues to grow exponentially.
This overabundance can be a large obstacle when, as a professional, you want to do your best to stay ahead of the game by continuously improving your skill set.
Because, to improve your knowledge and add to your skills, you need to consume quality content related to your field.
The problem occurs when you try to dig out the relevant content from the countless available possibilities.
The search for the info you need can start looking more like searching for a needle in a haystack.
Nonetheless, content creation isn’t going anywhere. Knowing that you can’t just press pause on the content creation button leaves us only with one viable solution: Improving our content filters.
Just because you can’t conquer it, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t fight it
In 2008, while speaking at the Web 2.0 Expo, Clay Shirky said that our problem wasn’t Information Overload, but Filter Failure.
In order to move past Information Overload and continue improving on our knowledge, each of us needs to create our own personal bubble that will help keep the irrelevant, low-quality content at bay, while serving us with the content we require.
Otherwise, we are doomed to being bombarded with irrelevant, repetitive information that will get us nowhere.
At this point, maybe you are thinking: Isn’t that what search engines are for? Doesn’t the most relevant content appear on the first page of the search results?
But when you look back at the history of SERPs, you’ll note that the best content hasn’t always risen to the top (some eerie examples of keyword stuffing come to mind).
Of course, today, search engines and their algorithms are more sophisticated.
However, they also are biased.
Just like you want to create your bubble where only relevant information is allowed to enter, the algorithms created by dominant companies want to keep you in their own bubble, where they only let you see the information they think you should see.
Be the boss of your own personal information bubble
Curating didn’t become a buzzword thanks only to tons of newsletter subscriptions you can’t convince yourself you don’t need.
There is some power behind that action, and that power can be used to fight Information Overload.
One “old-school” method for reaching good professional content is through Twitter lists. Still, those too can feel overcramped when you’re focusing on learning, and don’t want to scroll through the rest of the noise that comes with profiles. In my case, it takes stumbling across a single meme to put me off for a period of time.
Tools like Quuu, ScoopIt, Storify, etc. can help professionals uncover relevant content. But still, the quality of the content found there can vary.
In an article on prioritizing content consumption, Fred Wilson presents a different method for overcoming Information Overload.
It’s quite simple, actually: He uses people as a filter. His bubble is “a human shield”.
Fred reduced the amount of content noise in his environment by reducing the time he spends on social networks. Instead, his main source for discovering quality content are a dozen of people he knows and in whose taste for recognizing quality he trusts.
If they find an article and share it with him, he reads it. If they think it was worth their time, it’s a proof enough for him that the piece of content is actually something worth looking into. His friends are his content moderators.
To a certain extent, it makes a lot of sense.
Because, if you think about it, the ratio of articles you interact with on your social feeds is probably not nearly as high as with the ones your colleagues, for example, share with you on Slack.
Can human moderation be scaled?
Sure, Fred’s model works if you have clever friends who share great content. But can this method of content filtering work in a larger community?
While individual curation is a good method for conquering your own information overload one step at a time, creating a tool that helps users more easily acquire professional knowledge *and* have every piece of content approved by a human sounds like a hell of a job.
Unless you’re able to build an exquisite community.
There’s no one who better understands the problems information overload brings along than a fellow professional who struggled to find the exact same answer you are currently looking for.
Working together as a group with professionals who share similar standards and need to discover the same type of knowledge makes sense. Existing members can share their knowledge and create a system that welcomes new members and provides them with a base of useful, quality content. Consider the example of Stack Overflow, Duolingo, or our very own community for professional marketers — Zest.
With a core team of only 5 people, we were able to build a community of 17,000+ members. Together this community filters out content noise and curates quality. Using the community’s collective brain power and the power of cognitive computing, we all discover the content that helps us grow as professionals.
Uniting around the same cause
Information Overload is real, and it is an epidemic. If thousands (if not millions) people have trouble improving themselves and are finding themselves paralyzed in front of the massive amount of information flying around us, that is a serious problem and it should be addressed in that way.
However, the solution seems to appear on the horizon. What we need to do is combine our collective strengths and be the voice of unbiased, quality content.
