TMI

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Wright's Glut helped us understand how we've come to live in a world of information overload.

TMI (Not this kind, but this kind!)

For starters, we have to recognize that the information environment in which we are embedded as readers and writers is massive, overwhelming, and growing exponentially with each passing day. Alex Wright's book, Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages, gave us a historical overview of the way humans have attempted to manage the increasing scale of information overload and showed us that, as we have developed increasingly efficient methods for producing texts, we have built ourselves a conundrum: too much stuff for any individual human to ever sift through, much less read.

So we take to our own little corners and niches on the web and live there, reading snippets of many things, occasionally reading a long piece, not really thinking about how algorithms and metadata are structuring and shaping our view of the world, manipulating what we see and how what we see is situated in the larger information economy.

TMI