Over on TechCrunch, Erick Schonfeld suggests it’s time to hide the noise. He is specifically talking about Twitter, of course, as the noise generator du jour. Looking back to what he wrote 18 month ago, he notes:
I need less data, not more data. I need to know what is important, and I don’t have time to sift through thousands of Tweets and Friendfeed messages and blog posts and emails and IMs a day to find the five things that I really need to know.
But while he’s on the right track, his solution misses. What he says next is:
What these services should strive to do instead is hide the noise, keep it simple. Letting me sort through the stream by creating different groups and lists and columns of things and people I want to pay attention to is great, but it hardly solves the problem. Finding that one great Tweet from @Loic or anyone else I follow shouldn’t be a game of Where’s Waldo.
Of course, the answer is not simply more, it is less. It’s somewhat odd in this world of more is always better, but maybe it’s time to consider that there are times when more is simply more, not better.
I’ve before referenced this snip from a poem from Edna St. Vincent Millay:
Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour,
Rains from the sky a meteoric shower
Of facts . . . they lie unquestioned, uncombined.
Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill
Is daily spun; but there exists no loom
To weave it into fabric; undefiled
Proceeds pure Science, and has her say; but still
Upon this world from the collective womb
Is spewed all day the red triumphant child.
From this I take this progression – data is central, it leads to facts, one step up the chain, then facts manipulated and considered become in the hands of smart people knowledge, and knowledge applied becomes wisdom, which is what we all seek. But the ability to sift and to seek for understanding, my question is this – are we in a place where more flow is better, or where we bury the needed facts in such a pile that our search for wisdom in hindered and not helped?
Put this way, perhaps the answer speaks aloud.