Information Bombardment

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\f0\b\fs24 \cf0 Information Bombardment Video Transcript\
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>>The internet is more than you would ever want, but less than you\'92d expect\'85 because
there is such a deluge of material it\'92s difficult to make a choice. Technology is
not neutral, it comes with a message, it also comes with its own assumptions that you have
to be aware of.\ >> By the 1930s a team of Library scientists
calculated the cumulative codified information base of the world, which in simple English
means all the stuff we\'92ve been writing down since we started writing down stuff,
would double every thirty years. Which is a fantastic statistic because that means in
one generation all the world\'92s knowledge doubles, which, is quite remarkable because
thirty years is like one generation. You know parents and kids all work from different fields
of knowledge and that\'92s why they sometimes don\'92t understand each other, it\'92s this
generational gap. By the 1970s that number shrank again so that the cumulative codified
information base of the world would double every 7 years \
which is quite remarkable and a challenge for the educational system because if children
start school in grade one by the time they get to grade 8 there\'92s a whole new body
of knowledge in the world, so how are they supposed to keep up? How does the educational
system keep up?\ >> The internet for me is not in its infancy,
it\'92s still pre-natal, it hasn\'92t been properly born yet. It\'92s developing, it\'92s
growing, give it another fifty, sixty, seventy years then we can start talking about which
is the best thing to do. We\'92ve gotta try things and as long as they\'92re not obviously
causing damage or danger, then let\'92s just see how they play out over the next generation.
The book wasn\'92t invented in a day.\ >> In fact, if anything it\'92s helped. There\'92s
a lot more people offering programs to the masses that we could not do before. Like you
know for instance I offer teleconference or I can offer my manual on there to thousands
of people and my newsletter in one shot. And you know if they pick up one bit of information
that\'92s more than they could of by ordering a book in the old days not being able to get
it, they can get this instantly.\ >> On of the fundamental problems with individuals
today when they want to be productive as knowledge workers is this problem of information bombardment.
Information bombardment basically deals with how we get thrown all this information at
us and most of us it\'92s not useful. If you think of an average individual who might receive
a hundred emails in a day, and maybe ten or fifteen of those are of use. Eighty-five of
them are you know, the guy from Nigeria and people selling you Viagra, so we waste a lot
of time going through those.\ In the next few years the cumulative codified
information base of the world will double every eleven hours.\
That\'92s an astronomical statistic because it means with the genome sequence and the
Internet and with Google digitizing every document on the planet it\'92s gonna be very
very difficult for people to keep up at that accelerated rate. Think about the effect on
your personal life, the joke that I always use is you\'92ll go to sleep late on a Saturday
night, sleep in on a Sunday morning, you\'92ll be half as stupid as were the night before.\
>>People often lose track, they go in for one particular issue, find something that\'92s
interesting, go off on a tangent, and you know, half an hour later or so, this is very
interesting, this is actually really super stuff but wasn\'92t what I came in for initially
and they may have to backtrack and start over again. If you\'92ve got time, what\'92s the
harm in it? I like to do that, but it doesn\'92t answer my initial question, if that was a
question I needed to have for some other reason gotta go back and do it again, it\'92s a waste
of time, ya.\ >>We\'92re at a sort of a sandbox, a play
sort of period in time where people are able to learn about how it works.\
>>As individuals we have to learn how to seek out information in optimal and appropriate
ways. I call that the reduction of search costs. For example, let\'92s say that you
wanted to go to the movies and you wanted to find out what was playing at your local
cinema. You know ten, fifteen years ago, that task was a little more difficult that it was
today. You had to go get a newspaper, if you had a newspaper, you had to go down the street
pay for a newspaper, flip through the pages, find your cinema, look through the times.
Now you could automatically have that information emailed to your Blackberry so every Friday
night at 6pm the email would be sent based on your appeal of what type of movies you\'92d
like then you could go to the movies that night. So in that particular case, yes the
information has been made easier for you to get. But at the same time there are other
organizations that also want to seek that attention. There are retailers who want to
go after you who want to send you information, there are other services and products.\
>> I have Gmail as my email system and it has this little thing of ads at the side of
the screen and most of the time they\'92re totally off the wall but every so often, there\'92ll
be an ad for something I had wished existed, didn\'92t know existed and you know this odd
little service or whatever has found it\'92s customer. It lets companies and performers
and so on find their little niche.\ >>On one hand we\'92re trying to be more productive
because we have the Internet available to us, on the other hand we\'92ve got this thing
on our belts called a Blackberry, also known as a Crackberry because it\'92s drug induced
because you can\'92t live without it. Once you get that sense that you can have information
at your fingertips you can never go back.\ >>This is a phone, this is calendar I can
do e-books, music, anything right on it.\ >>Because these things become so addictive,
wanting to check our email, wanting to check our MSN, our Facebook accounts, our Blackberrys,
it\'92s very difficult to put them aside. We\'92re getting overloaded.\
>>Is that good or is that bad? Is that dumbing-down culture? Culture changes it will come and
it will go.\ >>We\'92re still working within the shells
of assumptions of how things work from previous generations, and until those are broken down
and this get to work within its own parameters, we\'92re gonna be limited, we\'92re not gonna
what we can do with it.\ >>I still read books, I still use a pencil.\
>>As an individual, you can choose to, problem is when you become a member of an organization.
So if you\'92re an entrepreneur you can choose to work and operate any way you like. If you
work for a large organization and everyone\'92s calendar and schedule and email and repository
and data and information and documents are on one central server and people use Blackberrys
to access them, you have no choice, unless you want to be the unproductive one. We know
that in the business world you don\'92t last long if you maintain your unproductive position.\
\ So the question really boils down to this
\'96 how can we maintain productivity as knowledge workers knowing that the world is going to
be bombarding us with information, much of which will be useless to us, and knowing that
the only scarce resource left today is your attention span. How do you choose to use the
next 24 hours?\ [End]\
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