So, if too much information is noise, what is too much meaning?

That's a question raised by David Weinberger in a recent newsletter article.  No answers:

So, if too much information is noise, what is too much meaning?

Add enough marbles to your marbles bag, and before too long you can't find your favorites. A bag of marbles doesn't get any smarter no matter how many marbles you put in. That's what information is like.

Meaning as sense-making is the opposite of a bag of marbles. Things gain meaning by being connected to other things: It's similar to this, contained in this, derives from that, could be used for that other thing, reminds me of something that reminds me of something else. Every connection adds to the potential for understanding. And what is too much understanding? I don't know, but I sure wish we'd try it for a change.

But it's not all marbles and rapture. Meaning can overwhelm understanding. We can be aware of so many different ways of taking something that we feel powerless to choose among them. Some people take drugs to feel that way. There are moments of poetry that overflow with meaning. There are times when the multiplicity of ways in which we make sense of our world fills us with despair, and times when it fills us with joy. There is no one way in which we have too much meaning.

So, in a way that seems either inevitable or too clever by half, the answer to the question "What is too much meaning?" depends on what meaning we make of it.

               

Comments

[jeremy hunsinger]

the problem with his account, if there is one... is that he seems to suppose that meanings are objects or things.... they are not, they are not a bag of marbles in as much as the marbles exist, they are our interpretations of that bag of marbles, meanings are processes, and specifically they are traceable trajectories, influenced by our lives(among other things) and the lives of other interpreters , ney narrators. we have too much meaning when we can no longer exchange the interpretation or tell the story. thus meaning is subjectively limited in projection, there is no way to determine its reception. a famous french philosopher once alluded to the fact that meaning was in the nose, it is in the statement.... 'do you smell that' it is in fact... in the noise that we share that we construct meanings, based on the sharing, the locus communus that we define collectively. so we need to avoid the constructions of 'I' or 'me' when talking about meaning, as there is both an intersubjectivity and a distributed subjectivity afoot. we learn... to smell, much as we learn to differentiate noise from information.

[Kevin]

I kind of smiled when I read this. My first reaction was that he was trying a little too hard on this one. I'm not sure we can have too much meaning. :)

[ClappingTrees]

I'm amused by the last statement, "'What is too much meaning?' depends on what meaning we make of it." And I agree with it.

Perhaps David W. is feeling overwhelming by the sheer amount of interesting and wonderful information / knowledge / meaning that he finds and that goes to him? Faced with a super-abundance of well-written informative useful... blogs, wikis and other media, I'm feeling this. And I think somewhere, I really need to draw a distinct line and say "NO" to many good things so that I can focus on the few good AND important things in my life at this moment.

[ClappingTrees]

On second thoughts, perhaps he meant that being presented with too many perspectives on the same thing (lots of meaning) can be too much? It's like that Calvin & Hobbes cartoon strip where Calvin (who was seeing multiple perspectives) and surroundings were depicted like a schizophrenic/late-Picasso painting.