Information filtering is a big deal, but common sense dictates that it’s going to become a much bigger issue and industry — and thankfully create a lot of jobs for our species.
Algorithms (e.g. search engines) are largely responsible for filtering information, but they lack a key refinement ability, which is filtering out a lot of undesirable information for any given person.
I subscribe to a collection of RSS feeds, and daily interact with them to update my knowledge.
Most entries into an RSS feed are rejected by yours truly on grounds of irrelevance, and carefully marking content as read is a reasonably serious time sink that I would love to remove from my busy life, at least so I can gain more knowledge from those daily reading sessions and have more opportunity to engage via comments (etc.)
Our best local news site (for prime example) is one of those feeds, because I want to stay informed about important community decisions (e.g. changes in law) that affect me and mine.
However, the vast majority of content (roughly 99%) pertains to murders and other crimes, fires, any other supposedly impressive tragedy, sports, and societal changes that never affect us.
To filter out that serious bulk of content, an algorithm can’t cut it (and isn’t available anyway).
I need a human being (more specifically a curator) to work with towards personalized content refinement, and if the price is right, I would even be willing to pay that individual (or more likely multiple people covering my multiple topics of interest) for their valuable service.
They wouldn’t need to directly affect my feeds, but instead simply build a website with a new feed meeting my subscription. Then based upon my explicit informational desires, they would filter in that relevance for my convenience.
They could even offer a news feed dedicated purely to content that literally affects us all, so anything outside of my desirable range, but imminently relevant, reaches my attention.
Obviously trust is a major issue here, but any good business owner understands the critical nature of likely hard-earned credibility that only comes with trustworthiness and the likely consequent word-of-mouth essential for healthily growing a client base. Moreover, the competition would likely be strong.
Based upon common sense, this is the future of journalism.
No more bias towards advertisers excessively poisoning our minds with their carefully crafted ‘your life sucks without x’ message.
No more need to stuff our minds with idiot-seducing content equivalent to constantly stuffing our faces with innutritious food.
Custom information feeds can be permanent or limited in duration to match a temporarily spiking interest.
The opportunities for this sort of information curation apparently reaches beyond my mental realm in this moment, but I think you get the idea.
I would love to know your opinion on this front.
Are you suffering from discomforting information management too?
Do you have an alternative preference?
Is there something else I should be asking here?
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