"Cognitive Overload" is an issue discussed here, where the mind can be overstimulated and contain too much information for the mind to sufficiently go through. But does every person reading online suffer from cognitive overload?
One would imagine that with so much information at our fingertips, inventions and creations would be bursting from everyone. There is no limit to the information a person can access or produce. We are, after all, living in the information age.
Clay Shirky wrote an article about Cognitive Surplus, and states that our information age allows us to harness "large community created projects" rather than each person separately wasting their time away. This is a solution to cognitive overload that makes sense - rather than trying to overcome all the information ourselves, we do it together.
This is the cognitive surplus - millions of minds working together to create. To create what? Anything. Everything. Shirky goes on in his article to discuss how the private sphere and public sphere have collided into an explosion of creativity, namely through Youtube and blogs. Keven Kelly also describes this phenomenon in his article "We are the web." He states that since the beginning of the internet, "we have encoded half a trillion versions of our collective story and put them in front of 1 billion people, or one-sixth of the world's population." Kelly's article is from 2005 - which means that these numbers have only gotten bigger.
But with everyone contributing so fast and so freely, it is allowing an online world of creation. Shirky states that "the world's people, and the connections among us, provide the raw material for cognitive surplus."
With so much information on the internet, however, the risk of cognitive overload is real. But this online community is able to sort the information for themselves. In the following video by Michael Wesch, he demonstrates how sorting online information through tagging and hyperlinking is a user-driven way to control the online information, and succeed in cognitive surplus.
As Wesch shows in this video, all aspects of organizing online information - hyperlinks, tags, etc - are user driven. He also shows that the online information is not a reigning form of chaos, but an information revolution. Wesch attributes this revolution to the online community that has come alive on the internet. For another video on online community and tagging, watch Wesch's video on our Evolution of Language Page.
Kelly calls this forum for tagging and linking "an interactive index that really works." Something everyone can understand and use, and it's instantaneous, the possibilities are enormous. There doesn't need to be one giant head controlling the internet - Kelly says that users "police themselves [...] Three billion feedback comments can work wonders."
Between community and creativity, the users of the online world can make the web into anything they want to. There may be a danger of cognitive overload, but as long as we continue to interact in the online forum, and people are there to continue this information revolution, then there is more than ever the possibility of cognitive surplus. This depends, as Shirky says, on "how well we are able to imagine and reward public creativity, participation, and sharing."
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Sources:
"Information R/evolution." Michael Wesch. Youtube.com. Oct 2007. Link.
Kelly, Kevin. "We Are the Web." Wired. 13.8 (2005). Web.
Shirkey, Clay. "Tapping the Cognitive Surplus: the sudden bounty of accessible creativity, insight, and knowledge is a public treasure, says a network guru." The Futurist. 44.6 (2010) 21.
Pictures from: ClipArtOf, and Abasa National Association