Sunday, September 18, 2011

World Wide Web Gets Chaotic



Social buttons, mobile applications, and cross-platform integration of social networks are the main culprits why it has become easier and faster to share contents day after day. The frequency of sharing has rapidly increased overtime, leaving us with the question – how do we manage all of the information in the long run?


Social networking site Facebook alone is able to generate four billion items out of all the status updates, images, videos, and links that users share every single day. What more if we add all the Twitter updates, news articles and personal stories shared by everyone else?

Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained that the growth of social sharing behaves exponentially. This means that users share twice as much today as they did one year ago. It could then be assumed that the amount of contents shared now will double and so forth throughout the coming years. Not only do we consider adults using the Internet today, but also the upcoming teens who grow older every day. If you think about it, the number will really be huge!

Are we about to face what some people have termed as the “Sharepocalypse,” an era of constant digital chaos characterized by tremendous information overload? Not only will it give us a hard time looking for credible facts, but also make our Internet referencing efforts unproductive.

What can we do about it? For now, there’s nothing really out there to stop the sharepocalypse from happening. Filtering can be done, but it will be very hard to choose among the many factors that and venues where people share things.

But I do hope there will come a time when innovators can think of a way on how this can be addressed. This issue of excess in shared contents will definitely open opportunities for companies to step up and create a startup. Perhaps Google, being the world’s best search engine, would play an important role in coming up with a solution that would address the issue.

In everything, there are pros and cons. While the Internet has greatly helped all of us in providing helpful information, sooner or later, we would eventually have to face the consequences of over sharing things.

Do you have any ideas on how we can regulate the sharing of contents, so that we can preserve the effectiveness of the Internet? Or, to put it bluntly, is there really a solution anyway?

Email me your thoughts at [email protected] or Tweet @GlennOng.

This article is my 32nd contribution to Manila Bulletin -- one of the Philippines' leading broadsheets -- published on September 12, 2011 (Monday) in the TechNews Section. You can view the PDF version here.

Photo Source: Manila Bulletin

7 comments:

Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts. Hmm. I just think it'd be too hard to implement for now. For sure there will be a lot of opposing views that'll rise up when this becomes proposed. But, there's no harm in trying.

Kevin, I share the same sentiment, but in case you haven't checked Facebook very recently, new ways to filter your newsfeed have been introduced. You might want to check how those might help you how you want to manage your newsfeed and how you get notofications. As for your suggestion, you have a very good point, but that is a very distant possibility. The last time I checked, on Facebook's welcome page, it still says "It's free and always will be."

Oh wow, I never got to notice that line "it's free and always will be"

I think aya glenn, As for my suggesttion for this problem is to have software that would not allow a user to post the same information that they post earlier.in this way the world wide web would not be junked by the same information that they post earlier.For me, the best way to have  credible information is to look for a site that has been reviewed by the scholar.In this way user could get reliable information, but the problem today not all scholarly reviewed article are free.

When I was doing some research works a couple of years ago this was my problem.  I cannot verify which data are accurate and which are not.  Most of the times, I cannot trust the credibility of the website or the writer of the post.

I think it would still take some time for Internet leaders to take significant steps addressing this issue. 

I agree. Students will definitely have a harder time researching next time. But it also has a good effect,because they will have more sources. It will depend on how they will filter information

Possible, but quite hard to control and demand

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