WHO HAS THE AUTHORITY TO PRIORITISE INFORMATION?
这就像历史剧里的一个问题，谁来写历史?历史学家对历史的影响是什么。这在很大程度上取决于当时的社会价值和惯例:如Searle， ?Making the social World，?这是另一个非常有用的节目的主题。
The problem is not having too much information, the problem is 1. faulty information, and 2. unqualified editors. Those with the expertise to edit the great miscellany for us are the true heroes of our culture: small press editors, art gallery owners, performing arts presenters, restaurant critics, etc. They edit the vast cultural landscape, and give us what is worthy, based on their expertise. Stuff like Zagat, Yelp and Wikkipedia let everyone be authoritative regardless of qualifications ? hyper-democracy is full of wrong and dangerous ideas; hyper-egalitarianism denigrates and devalues expertise.
The other danger comes from the word and syntax searching mechanism (which I am sure all out there are using). The old way of doing research was to come up with an IDEA, based on study and experiment, and then to keep notes on the IDEA in practice, and finally make some conclusions about theory. Think of the mechanism of WORD searching: it supplants IDEA exploration. I think by the substitution of word searching for idea research, our idea capabilities will atrophy.

You have raised a lot of problems, without giving any answers. Maybe that?s a good thing. It?s borring to live in a world full of clearness.
回到正题，在我看来，我们面临着一个古老秩序的崩溃，而我们不是?我应付不了新的。
We are in a desperate need of regulating ideas ? those ideas which provide us a description of the ?scene? and give a meaning to our search.
Yes, this world, unfortunately, lacks regulating ideas. And above all lacks those ?authorities? which are supposed to bring them on the surface. If you have strong regulating ideas, you?ll find that information is as much as you need.
Greetings,
Lucian

yes, you seem particularly affected by too much information.

The reality of TMI---something I have been concerned with for nearly ten years---seems finally beginning to surface. I wondered when the realization would over shadow the infatuation; when common sense would trump popular culture. Affirmation is comforting. I may yet get that book finished and published. We shall see.
Thanks for bringing the topic to the PT table. It is timely and on point.

Sorry, it is not TMI it is laziness in accepting the first page of the search engine. Wiki or the Pop Sci article is simply a start. Follow the links and the references in the links and you might find what you need.

I remember reading McLuhan's books on media and information, and later, things like Future Shock and The Third Wave by Toffler. Mr. Patino says that someone among us (I'm not sure to whom he is referring)is"particularly affected by too much information." I would submit to our host and commenters-at-large that we are all particularly affected---all of us anyway who follow the media mode of paying attention to it all.
And that is just the point, actually. Media is intended to affect us. Deeply. It makes people and conglomerates extremely wealthy and drives a huge segment of economies, local; national and global. I am certain there are profit/loss figures available which might boggle our minds. And that is another aspect of TMI which has insinuated itself into our twenty-first century milieu: we have been persuaded that there is no way we could ever get along without it, and how did we ever do so in the first place? The sales pitch has been relentless. And successful. Most everyone believes the propaganda, and this makes it true---something we playfully call: self-fulfilling prophecy. Isn't it great to be us?

是的，几年前，当我去猎鹿的时候，我妻子让我带着手机去野外。我被她的建议逗乐了，我告诉她，鹿不带手机，即使它们带手机，我怀疑它们也不会接电话。她不觉得好笑。但我还是不带手机去打猎。事情就是这样的。

There's so much here that made me think that its energized me even without my morning cup of coffee.
On the one hand, this makes me think of Thomas Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49 and the concept of information entropy. At what point does to much information simply become, well, noise?
也就是说，蒂姆提出了一个很好的问题，关于历史学家对历史的影响，在这个例子中，就是“图书馆学”对我们创造知识范式的影响。这些有序的书架上摆放着编码书籍，为我们的知识组织创造了一个非流动的系统，扩展开来，它们定义了我们如何分类和组织我们的知识，我们的理解，等等。可搜索的、开放的数据库的开放性给了我们前所未有的流动性，在我们将信息背景化和分类时，反过来，我认为至少在某种程度上，这从根本上改变了我们了解信息的方式。
Regarding the codes themselves, at one point, the academic becomes initiated in the language of the library, of the card catalogs, of the arcane codes written on the spine of the books we love. This adds a division between "us" and the rest of the world who would be quite lost if they found themselves amidst the stacks of a university library. The internet has freed the information and left it there for the taking. Good or bad? I'm not making that judgement...
Thanks for the food for thought this morning! Now for some coffee...