Some thoughts on the Information Age

 

The Information Age, also commonly known as the Computer Age or Digital Age, is an idea that the current age will be characterized by the ability of individuals to transfer information freely, and to have instant access to information that would have been difficult or impossible to find previously. The idea is linked to the concept of a digital age or digital revolution, and carries the ramifications of a shift from traditional industry that the industrial revolution brought through industrialization, to an economy based on the manipulation of information, i.e., an information society.

-           Wikipedia

“In the information age, it is not what you know, but what you can find; genius will be measured by the speed at which you can find things.”

-          Anonymous

 "Imagine a school with children that can read or write, but with teachers who cannot, and you have a ametaphor of the Information Age in which we live."

- Peter Cochrane

“The Information Age offers much to mankind, and I would like to think that we will rise to the challenges it presents. But it is vital to remember that information— in the sense of raw data— is not knowledge, that knowledge is not wisdom, and that wisdom is not foresight. But information is the first essential step to all of these.”

-          Arthur C Clarke

 "Trying to control information in the network age is about as successful as pissing into the wind."

-           Keith Henson

“The ‘stone age was marked by man’s clever use of crude tools; the ‘information age’, to date, has been marked by man’s crude use of clever tools.

Say goodbye to the ‘information age’.

..the ‘informnation age’ has quickly turned into old information.  It’s already over and today we’re making our waythrough the ‘too-much-information age’.

..the interesting thing the Atomic Age, the Nuclear Age, and even the Space Age have in common is that they don’t mark any really profound changes in the average human life.

Now there has been an explosion of digital content at an exponential rate, more than double as much content today as there was at this time last year.  The information is becoming more difficult to handle and navigate, with 546 million websites (compared to 249 million last year).  Looking over the horizon into the not too distant future, there is evolving a much more careful curation of data and increased roles of third party groups like ‘Find the Best’  as the market need rapidly increases and evolves.

Understand that just because some data that is supposed to be ‘open and available’ does not mean ot is either discoverable or usable.  Much public information, for instance, may be available online but it is unstructured and sketchy format at best.

Structuring all that info for any level of usability requires scalable human curation that goes way beyond just contributions of the open source kind.

So, in the near future (less than five years) good clean usable data that is more effective, engaging, inviting and more generally interesting, won’t exist without some level of human curation, for information with value.”

-          Russ Altman, 21 December 2011