Media Overload .:. grubbykid.com

Media Overload

Awhile back, Amy Harmon at the New York Times asked a question about digital image overload:

For a[n] article about about the huge volume of images people are generating with digital cameras, I am looking for people to interview about the various coping mechanisms that are arising to deal with the image overload.

So I spent some time trading emails with Ms. Harmon, and it became clear (to me) that this issue isn't photograph overload, but rather photograph overload is a subset of the problem of media and general information overload. Of course as things go, nothing we talked about made it into the final article, Stop Them Before They Shoot Again, which deals wholly on digital glut. So it goes, but the larger issue of information overload, while debated at length, is an important issue which must be dealt with for the foreseeable future. First, let me tackle the narrower question of digital photograph glut, and then how digital images are different than text and music, and finally how the tools Flickr has built mitigate digital photograph glut.

One way of coping with photograph glut, could be through limited numbers of contacts, so that the photos found on your "Photos from your contacts" page is lower. This is the coping method through a limit.

According to Flickr user GustavoG the average number of Flickr contacts is 4.7 - which is lower than the upper limit that sociologists have put for tolerable members of social groups. If I can remember correctly this is in the 6-12 member realm, but don't quote me on that. In other words, there is a upper bound on the group size we humans can easily interact with and that is reflected in the average number of Flickr contacts. Additionally, there are thousands (millions) of groups in Flickr, which I touched upon in an article entitled, Flickr Group Roundup, which users can create their own, smaller, social group.

Another method of tolerating photograph volume is that your threshold for crap becomes way lower. Scanning over photos which aren't of interest or lower quality and ignoring them becomes an effective coping mechanism.

So those are some coping methods which I have teased out from talking to people, and through my own experience. The above coping methods are photograph-centric, but work pretty well across media types. But the problem of photograph glut is merely a subset of the overarching question of information overload. While other smarter people have tackled this, I want to sidestep the main question and look into the different data types which make up this information overload. Yes, in the digital age we are awash in data, but how we handle and process the data is vastly different. I think this sets photos apart from text and music.

Due to years of evolution humans have become very adept at making snap visual decisions (Malcolm Gladwell - Blink anybody?). I would guess that this trait would be really important on the plains of the Serengeti in order to find lunch or not become lunch; but this trait also comes in handy when evaluating images. I can evaluate thousands of photos in a shorter amount of time than I could read & comprehend text or evaluate to music. It doesn't matter if they are digital or physical objects, processing photos is quicker due to our quick visual skills derived so long ago.

This is why buying a book from Amazon and using their paltry "What's Inside" feature rarely is helpful: you need more than a few pages to evaluate a book, and often you need an outside review to influence the purchase. A similar phenomenon involves iTunes with their 30 second preview - this is often not helpful enough in evaluating a song. Music takes longer to sink in and connect.

Compare that with the text overload possible with RSS Readers. Opening up a feed reader and have 100 new articles to read right off the bat forces you to recognize the huge time commitment which, I am often loath to do. Regardless of length of text, the processing power and energy required to read those articles is magnitudes greater than going through photographs. 100 new photographs are a snap to go through compared to text: if there are photos I think are good, or that I want to comment on, you can set aside those photos for later (more stringent) review - again, regardless if the photographs are digital or analog. I still shoot quite a lot of film, so developing (by hand), printing (by hand), creating contact sheets (by hand), and archiving is way more difficult than merely using a digital camera and uploading to Flickr. But human process image data more efficiently than text, probably due to the fact that there is less processing jumps needed in evaluating images than text.

Setting aside differences between media types, information glut is information glut - which can bog anyone down. Where development energy will be most crucial, is in the tools of how to manage the vast digital media being produced by humanity - and Flickr is leading the charge. By uploading to Flickr, I can access the same photos in many different ways: through tags, by creating photo sets, through adding photos to group pools, and by date, among other methods. If I use my digital camera, more metadata is added so that finding and dealing with the terabytes of data becomes approaches trivial. By using the Flickr API I, or other smarter programmers, can create new interfaces and workflow methods. This isn't to say that as we go along this digital trip, new tools and interfaces will have to emerge.

What makes going through all of the millions of photos on Flickr enjoyable, is that there are tons of really creative people doing really creative things. I wrote about the different economies springing up on Flickr and the fact that, for the most part, Flickr operates on a "Gift Economy" basis, where many are uploading
images using Creative Commons deeds and others using that grist for cool things Additionally, there are groups and images there for any mood your are in and any project you might be thinking about. This also feeds back into the creativity of Flickr.

Until similar advances in dealing with text and music are created, the tools that Flickr has created are brilliant time-savers which help the mitigate the digital photograph glut. I honestly do not have any ideas how to facilitate dealing with text, but the internet and hyperlinking is a start. If anyone has interesting links to smart people doing cool stuff with data stores, text retrieval, etc, I would be highly interested.

Media Overload

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