low inertia

I’m an elitist

I’m using the old bait and switch here; I’m not an elitist in the traditonal sense (though I suppose an argument can always be made). I’m an elitist when it comes to information. I only want information about things which are interesting or relevant to me. That certainly sounds elitist in the traditional sense, but it’s true. We live in a time where:

1. There is more human generated information than ever before
2. There is more access to this ever growing set of information than ever before

Every individual’s sphere of personal interest will encompass a smaller and smaller part of the world’s database as the human population grows. Simultaneously, the number of datapoints within a person’s sphere of interest will grow faster than it ever has before. This situation is untenable if framed in the context of an open internet where any datum’s validity must be determined by each individual accessing it. The need to accumulate good information for personal use would grow to an unmanageable task.

As such, I feel that Etsy, YouTube, del.icio.us or any user-generated content site are almost unusable in and of themselves. There is way too much to filter to find appealing information, regardless of what you’re looking for. I think we still need to heed Walter Lippmann thoughts on filtering content. We still need gate-keepers.