More and more the big players of today’s internet are allocating funds and computer processing power to one of those tasks that humanity has been trying to accomplish since the beginning of times.

Organizing human knowledge and indexing the collective written or graphic output of the 6 billion of us is no small assignment. Not one less noble and therefore less elusive than ridding mankind of diseases or purging the planet of oppression.

Google has revealed a significant upgrade of its reading robots super powers. Those little and hidden indexing machines are now making copies of what we write on Twitter, Facebook and the likes. Millions of us use those services to throw quick lines about everything that goes through our minds.

Nobody should question the value of those tools, as they are an innovative and exciting way of communicating. Internet chatting in its many forms is up high on the same chapter of other big inventions such as the radio and the telephone. The problem is replicating data exponentially and retaining it for too long. The Google results page always make sure that we find something, but are we finding what we want or are we being led to start wanting what happens to be shown in front of us?

The more effective Google gets on its quest to the Eldorado once pursued by Diderot and D’Alembert, the more blatant is the absence of easy to use filters to its ferocious output of data triggered by its Search button. Splitting the online world into formal categories such as web, images and news is just not enough and more and

more attentive internet players have noticed that, even though good solutions still seams to be miles of search pages away. In a recent interview to the podcast hosted by the British magazine Web Designer, Martin Kallstrom, CEO of the Swedish service Twingly, touched on that point when explaining his new service Twingly Channels. “Communities are getting more vertical in order to reduce noise”, he said.

Our ability to eliminate noise and our ability to forget are crucial to our ability to learn and to think. Selective memory is not a trick of bad politicians or lazy husbands, but an aspect of human behaviour capable of creating paranoids by the millions if amputated from our daily lives. “Culture is only true when implicitly critical, and the mind which forgets this revenges itself in the critics it breeds. Criticism is an indispensable element of culture”, once said the German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, who was worried with the overfeeding of information in human society before the first e-mail was even drafted.

It is Christmas time and one image comes to my mind when I try to visualize Google’s little bots reading and copying everyone’s twits and status updates. A Middle Age monk, trapped in his monastery’s library, away from daylight and holding a little plate with a candle while looking for his next tome to copy. In this new millennium, copying is, as it was on the last two, our main way of diffusing knowledge, but overfeeding our memory is a burden to our minds and souls. In order to reduce noise, shall we all unplug our ipods for a little moment, google the lyrics of our favourite Carol and have a merry and peaceful Christmas. One that get us ready for more and more efficient searches when the New Year arrives.

1. Don’t look for past entries. This is this blog’s first post.

2. Twingly Channels are at twingly.com and the Web Designer magazine is at webdesignermag.co.uk