Too much information?

Blogging Thoughts, by Toril Mortensen and Jill Walker (2002), was probably the first academic article to be published about blogging (well, they didn’t find any others when they were researching it, so I’ll take their word for it). Their article is based on their own experiences of blogging, and of prominent others in the blogging community such as Evan Williams, Rebecca Blood, Dave Winer, Cameron Marlow, Tom Matrullo and Biz Stone. They also draw on the writings of Pierre Bourdieu (taste and culture), Roland Barthes (ordering), Jurgen Habermas (transformation of the public sphere), Douglas Englebart (human-computer interaction) and Vannevar Bush.

See what I did there? By adding hyperlinks to various other blogs and wikipedia articles, this post becomes an entry point to an ever-expanding web of information and potential routes for further growth in a number of directions. I can come back to it at any time and use the links to find and follow an interesting path. Readers of this blog can set up an RSS feed for it or link to individual posts from their own pages. As Mortensen and Walker write: “take the links out of a weblog and you are left with a web diary, a much more introverted and private form of writing.”

Until reading Blogging Thoughts, I hadn’t heard of Vannevar Bush, who, in his 1945 essay ‘As We May Think’ conceptualised a machine, a memex, that could store all available knowledge and its associative trails. Apart from underestimating the degree to which we would one day be able to compress data, Bush was right on the money with the direction in which information technology is moving. Although, as I implied earlier, these associative trails made up of web directories and hyperlinks have huge benefits for learning, the scale of associations brings challenges. For example, even when I focus my research on one small aspect of blogging, a vast web of information and opinion seems to opens out from every page, extending to depths that I am incapable of exploring fully. Writing an assignment that draws on a bibliography of 20 peer-reviewed publications seems a piece of cake compared to using a resource base of several thousand (million?) pages, many of which require an informed judgement to be made about their validity. It’s a case of too much information, and shows up very clearly the need for new digital literacies (as proposed by Steve Wheeler at a workshop I attended last week); from finding, storing and applying information to assessing the value of information and synthesising new connections. Mortensen and Walker, who could only base their paper on their personal experience, “given the lack of previous research on weblogs, and of other researchers using blogs”, probably had an easier job.

I’m sure I’ll come back to the issue of hyperlinking very soon…