Spam filter working?

Why isn’t your life an idyll of serenity, pleasure and ease? Possibly the least controversial observation it’s possible to make about the world is that we live in an era of Too Much Information: too many emails, too many memos to read, too many books and podcasts and films and TV shows we’d like to check out. People – journalists, especially – have fretted for years about “information overload”, but the techno-optimists’ antidote has always been simple: better filters. As the data deluge increases, they argue, so, too, does the efficacy of the tools for sifting wheat from chaff. Spam filters are one example, but so are improved search engines: Amazon’s “recommended for you” feature, Gmail’s Priority Inbox, and the way social-networking sites tend to lead you to the stuff your friends enjoy. These days, our filters are better than ever. This is why you no longer feel overloaded, and your life is an idyll of serenity, pleasure and ease. Oh, hang on. It isn’t, is it? You feel as deluged as ever. But the techno-pessimist Nicholas Carr recently made a striking suggestion as to why this might be: not because the filters are no good, but because they’re too good . The received wisdom on modern-day distractedness is that we’re constantly lured away from important matters by ephemera: silly cat videos, George Michael’s Twitter stream, this week’s celebrity meltdown. True, that plays a part (I

Posted by on April 8, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.