TMI and the demand for better filtering - John D. Pierce Blog .

By John Pierce

The amazing benefits of advanced technology are numerous. I receive them with each instant contact with home and friends or when able to work productively from a chocolate shop or hotel room.

However, something must be done to treat the strain of too much information. My next smart phone upgrade will look on who gives me the best filtering options.

There must be some immediate and comfortable way to say a smart phone (by punching a pair of keys) that I`d sooner not receive messages from that sender again. I drop too much time each day stopping to delete something of no concern to me.

We are flooded with stuff: TMI. How do we sort through it all?

Personally, all technologically connected people cope with this issue. Professionally, many of us do as well - especially in the communications field.

Recently, my acquaintance and colleague Bruce Gourley sent this quotation from Editor-in-Chief Tina Brown of the website, The Daily Beast, that acquired Newsweek:

"What a clip can offer readers is a way to understanding, a trickle to sift out what's important, a suspension to see things that the Web has no time to explain, a creature to go back over the things we believe we love but can't make sense of. A magazine allows the referee to work in a different key."

My intellect of an editor`s role is that of a filter. It`s different than a censor who restricts information based on what suits a personal agenda. Rather it is an attempt to determine what is accurate, relevant and of most concern to the specific audience of readers.

Filtering, or editing, is not an exact science but an ongoing act of making judgments about what deserves to look in print (or online, which has fewer restrictions).

One subscriber and supporter said to me a few days ago: "I`m a really busy person and don`t take time to separate through all of the material out there. Please leave me plenty of what I want to stay informed."

In other words, he was calling me to the job of filtering. Finding the right filters, whether gadgets or humans, is necessary to our personal lives and professional productivity.

Yet in the everyday globe of TMI, we are all filters - seeking to meet the data we want and desire while not being buried by the avalanche of unwanted stuff flowing our way. Information is good. Too much data is, well, way too much.

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