RE: Internet Determined Identity
Going along with your (almost) theme; At the bookstore the other day, I saw three complete shelves with books on dealing with "information overload". Coping strategies of every kind could be found in the titles, from tantric breathing to speed reading, it was all there.
For my part, I wonder if we are looking at this whole thing in the wrong way. Instead of feeling some vague guilt about not knowing enough, focusing on the wrong things, or giving attention to trivialities, maybe we need to start asking better questions. I've been working on this thought for some time now and still do not have any greater clarity than when I started. I have thought lately, though, that since I do not appear to be capable of sorting the seeds from the chaff efficiently, maybe I need to start building bots that will help me do it better.
Yes, interesting observation. This "information overload" is the main theme of this and the upcoming decades I think and maybe we do need more technology to be able to organize this information to useful material that will not be so overwhelming. At some point we will have to face this chaos that we have created though, in order to benefit from it. We can build bots and computers that will learn immense quantity of information in basically no time, yet our own computer (our brain) still has super slow updating speeds (learning takes a lot of effort). Yet again, like you said, maybe this is the wrong approach.