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[- On Convenience
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By marcbohlen, Section Filter It Yourself!
Posted on Fri May 2nd, 2003 at 02:21:41 PM EURODISCORDIA TIME
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Information junkies: This is for you. You, as I have been indulging in up to the minute news coverage for too long. Lust to know what just happened - somewhere.
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I know of the SARS epidemic, not because I read about it in the news, but because I live in Toronto. What I see in the streets belies what I read and hear in the news. Even when the facts are on target, the tone feels wrong; the situation simplified.
I think there is a structural problem with information ubiquity. We really have not yet figured out how to harvest knowledge and meaning from all the networked information sources. Whom do I trust, who has it right? Go with the trusted sources, no? I used to read
the **Times. Oh, I can just go to Le Monde and get it right, no? Listservs? Ask your networked friends. They might know.
There are just too many ways of getting partial perspectives of events and no means by which to integrate them into coherence. We can peek into every corner of the globe but by which means do we make sense out of this information? There is no deeper understanding of Kabul, for me, just because I can see a satellite photo of the Id Gah Mosque. We have been cheating ourselves into believing we know more just because we can see and hear more in continuously shorter intervals. Technologies of instantaneity are convenient, too convenient. They are selective and remove what does not fit the interval of the preconceived. Like shopping prefabricated clothing; everything looks good, nothing really fits.
We need thought processes and information technologies that take the state of information overflow and knowledge underflow into account.
How can we make sense of all this? Knowledge is an integration of contextualized data. It is accumulated and digested. It is lived,
over time. We have been spending too much energy on collecting items. We need intelligent ways of layering; building from instantaneous data to rich data that actually means something. Time for inventory. Maybe DISCORDIA can help.
[editor's note, by TreborScholz] |
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