Information is like currency: if you have a lot of it (and are willing to share) your perceived value to certain segments of society is automatically elevated. Whether that knowledge is relevant to a social circle, political institution, corporation, or any other segment, it’s your relative ability to contribute to the pool of collective knowledge that really matters. Being an informed person isn’t something that just happens, though. A valuable knowledge base can only be built with time and commitment.
Twenty years ago this process of gathering information and staying up to date could almost be considered a trivial task. Information flowed at a snail’s pace and there weren’t even that many channels to monitor. We could read the daily paper or a book, or talk to a friend, or watch the news, or listen to the radio… In any case staying up to date consisted of a few relatively simple tasks.
Fast forward to today and we quickly realize that advances in technology have allowed for the creation of countless new information feeds. More importantly, they have accelerated the flow of information delivery to real-time. Under most circumstances these would be considered wonderful advances but without currently adequate information management systems the value of the advances we have made in information delivery is greatly marginalized. We are simply overloaded with information.
I personally monitor more dynamic feeds than is probably productive. From Facebook, to Twitter, Reddit, CNN, TechCrunch, multiple Blogs, email threads and beyond, the sheer volume of information I encounter on even a minute-to-minute basis can sometimes be overwhelming. I do use a few tools (feed aggregators) to help me get by, but I’m still presented with the challenge of assessing what I should actually read in the moment. Sure, I can skim summaries of everything, but a great depth of knowledge in a single subject is infinitely more valuable today than a shallow knowledge of everything. A careful balance must then be struck.
A second issue presents itself in that while all this information is stored on a back-end server somewhere, if I want to buy that cool dog toy I read about last month, where should I even start looking in all of my feeds to find out where I saw it? How do I even conduct a search on half of these feeds anyway? A Google search of the entire public internet is only so effective, especially when the words “dog toy” pull up 18,800,000 results.
Before information sources and feeds take another leap forward in volume and speed of delivery, advances have to be made that can help us organize, recall, and ultimately derive more value from what we already receive. Zukmo is taking that challenge head-on, but that’s something for another post.
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