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We live in a time of information abundance, which far too many of us see as information overload. With the sum total of human knowledge, past and present, at our fingertips, we’re faced with a crisis of attention: which ideas should we engage with, and why? Big Think is an evolving roadmap to the best thinking on the planet — the ideas that can help you think flexibly and act decisively in a multivariate world.

A word about Big Ideas and Themes — The architecture of Big Think

Big ideas are lenses for envisioning the future. Every article and video on bigthink.com and on our learning platforms is based on an emerging “big idea” that is significant, widely relevant, and actionable. We’re sifting the noise for the questions and insights that have the power to change all of our lives, for decades to come. For example, reverse-engineering is a big idea in that the concept is increasingly useful across multiple disciplines, from education to nanotechnology.

Themes are the seven broad umbrellas under which we organize the hundreds of big ideas that populate Big Think. They include New World Order, Earth and Beyond, 21st Century Living, Going Mental, Extreme Biology, Power and Influence, and Inventing the Future.

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Transcript

Question: What has been Craigslist’s impact on newspaper classified ads?

Newmark: To people who are seriously involved in the journalism industry say that we’ve had a minor effect on classified revenues. There are factors, a lot of them, and that’s a process of creative destruction, kind of like the replacement of buggy whips by car parts. However, a vigorous press is needed for the survival of any democracy, so on a personal basis, I’m pretty concerned about that and so I try to help out people in journalism who are a lot smarter than me. They are trying to preserve the best of journalism and journalistic jobs, and then try to build that into the new media environment.

Question: What is Craigslist’s contribution to new media?

Newmark: The dots may not actually connect, [the idea]. Craigslist’s sole contribution so far to the new media environment in the sense of helping along is this work with the Berkeley Center for New Media. Personally, I’m involved in a number of desperate efforts where I feel some connection and when I can see people are doing stuff that actually gets something done. And some work with Jay Rosen, some with Jeff Jarvis or Dan Gillmor, some with Ellen Miller at Sunlight Foundation, some work with Consumers Union which does customer reports. And also with the Berkeley Journalism School, they’re doing some really good hyperlocal work and I’ve engaged with them a bit. There’s also other efforts to News Trust, maybe Spot.US. NewsTrust represents an effort, a net base to build metrics and to use people to help figure out what are the most trustworthy versions of news stories. Spot.US is much newer and I’m still [into] it, but I think the theme there is how might one commission a story, some kind of news story to get it done well in a trustworthy manner. The hard part in a lot of these is fact checking and I’m also involved in FactCheck.org in a very minor way.