I recently heard in some presentation at Facebook, "every second, approximately 5000 hours of consumable content is getting generated". Meaning, if you look at the text, video, music or any kind of content generated within a second, it'll take you about 5000 hours to read/hear/watch it. Now, some of this information might be repetitive, some might be incorrect, and some might be even irrelevant to you. But, the fact that so much content is there, is mind boggling.
Now, this causes a shift of paradigm in knowledge consumption. In my childhood, the overall assumption was that more knowledge makes your life better. So, our brains were trained to grab more and more information wherever it came from. We read some interesting books, we watched videos (In TV and in cinemas), we listened to radio, conversations. We tried to grab opportunity of grabbing as much as possible. Of these, our knowledge was the filtered information. We dissected information, tried to find right, wrong and relevant parts of it, and we consumed the right one, discarding the rest. But, even then, the remaining information did stay in our head. Because that's how our subconscious works.
Now, given the usage of internet, where all information is freely accessible and all relevant/irrelevant information is up for grabs, this old approach has noise issues. Imagine 1000 people trying to tell you something at a time. Individually, each one of them may have a point. Some of their points may be contradicting to each other. Some might simply be irrelevant for you. But, you still hear all of them. And your brain gets a sense of being full of knowledge, whereas it's just full of information. The dissection process hasn't even taken place. So, your mind is filled with so many contradictory statements, that you haven't got time to resolve and you have so much irrelevant content which is not so easy to get rid of.
Because of this, in later stages, your brain understands this problem, and starts making auto-dissection of this information. It knows its limits, and it must keep only limited information as "knowledge". So, it goes to bias. Every human mind has his own set of biases about what's right and what's wrong. In an ideal world, where flow of information and dissection rates are comparable, these biases are supposed to be changed/corrected by this information, like re-evaluation of basic concepts. But, when we haven't got time to do so, we just keep our biases as they are. And so, we assume right and wrong based on our biases, which even strengthens the biases themselves. Like if you think dinosaurs are cute, and all you see is cute Dino cartoons, you'll strongly think that dinosaurs are cute. Maybe you're too scared to watch Jurassic park or maybe someone else made that decision for you, or you just ignored it completely by separating dinosaurs from some ugly monsters in the movie. In the end, your bias is set.
So, I think it's time to change the knowledge gaining strategy. One way is to consume only verified and well noted resources. But, that causes lack of complete picture in many cases. One more way is to keep the biases, and do more evaluation on biases all the time. This works, till someday if you find mistake in them, and you go in limbo, and think that your whole life is a lie. Or you simply carry your bias till the grave. Another way is to dissect all information coming to you at any rate. Well, any brainiacs here? Because we need one for this. :) I myself chose a way. Now, you may call or right or wrong. I ignore most of what's going on around me, consciously. I stay low in conversations as well. This gives me some disadvantage in debates, since I don't stick to some bias or opinion. But, it helps me stay focused on things that matter to me. And since all information is available at any time, whenever I am in dire need of information, I just, "get it".
We are in a flood of knowledge. Let me know what are the strategies you've found to stay afloat.
