[kictanet] Fw: Information-rich and attention-poor

Mon Sep 14 15:21:29 EAT 2009

Matunda,

Interesting
article.....maybe many of us have become a reflection of information rich but
attention poor. I particularly like the following extract (so true and a great
basis for discussion):

"The
old Encyclopedia Britannica was quintessentially a stock; Wikipedia is the
paradigmatic example of flow. Obviously, a stock of knowledge is rarely
permanent; it depreciates like any other form of capital. But electronic
information technology is profoundly changing the rate of depreciation. By
analogy with the 24-hour news cycle (which was an early consequence of the
growing abundance of video bandwidth as cable television replaced scarce
over-the-air frequencies), there is now the equivalent of a 24-hour knowledge
cycle – “late-breaking knowledge,” as it were. Knowledge is becoming more like
a river than a lake, more and more dominated by the flow than by the stock.
What is driving this?”

Nyaki

________________________________
From: Matunda Nyanchama <mnyanchama at aganoconsulting.com>
To: elizaslider at yahoo.com
Cc: KICTAnet ICT Policy Discussions <kictanet at lists.kictanet.or.ke>
Sent: Saturday, September 12, 2009 7:39:31 PM
Subject: [kictanet] Fw: Information-rich and attention-poor

This is an interesting read in this time and age: of data and information glut.

Enjoy

Information-rich and attention-poor  
Peter Nicholson 
From Saturday's Globe and Mail Last updated on Saturday, Sep. 12, 2009 04:09AM EDT 
Twenty-eight years ago, psychologist
and computer scientist Herbert Simon observed that the most fundamental
consequence of the superabundance of information created by the digital
revolution was a corresponding scarcity of attention. In becoming
information-rich, we have become attention-poor. 

The three technologies that have powered the information revolution
– computation, data transmission and data storage – have each increased
in capability (and declined in cost per unit of capability) by about 10
million times since the early 1960s. It is as if a house that cost half
a million dollars in 1964 could be bought today for a nickel, or if
life expectancy had been reduced from 75 years to four minutes. 

This has unleashed a torrential abundance of data and information.
But economics teaches that the counterpart of every new abundance is a
new scarcity – in this case, the scarcity of human time and attention.
The cost of one's time (approximated, for example, by the average wage)
relative to the cost of data manipulation, transmission and storage has
increased roughly 10-million-fold in just over two generations – a
change in relative “prices” utterly without precedent. This, above all,
is what is driving the evolution of online behaviour and culture, with
profound implications for the production and consumption of knowledge.
The primary consequence is the growing emphasis on speed at the expense
of depth. 

Behaviour inevitably adapts to conserve the scarce resource – in
this case, attention and time – and to “waste” the abundant resource.
Thus, for example, much of the new technology's capability has been
spent on simplifying interfaces and reducing communications latencies
essentially to zero; both of these conserve precious time for users.
The same motive has also spawned a plethora of indexing and searching
schemes, of which Google is the chief example. These are all seeking to
be attention-optimizers. 

Today's information technology is nowhere near its theoretical
physical limits, though many engineering and cost hurdles may slow
development after 2015. Nanotechnologies and quantum phenomena
nevertheless promise to support a new growth path for decades to come.
For example, a recently announced storage technology using carbon
nanotubes may allow digital information to be held without degradation
for a billion years or more – an innovation that would eliminate the
major shortcoming of the digital archive. 

We may think metaphorically of the production of knowledge as a
function of “information” and “attention,” with attention understood as
the set of activities by which information is ultimately transformed
into various forms of knowledge. By virtue of its unprecedented impact
on the relative prices of information and human attention, information
technology is driving a correspondingly profound transformation of
knowledge production, the main feature of which is a shift of emphasis
from “depth” to “speed.” This is simply because depth and nuance
require time and attention to absorb. So as attention has become the
dominant scarcity, depth has become less “affordable.” Moreover, with
information so abundant, strategies are needed to process it more
quickly, lest something of vital interest or importance is missed. 

THE 24-HOUR KNOWLEDGE CYCLE 
Knowledge is evolving from a “stock” to a “flow.” Stock and flow –
for example, wealth and income – are concepts familiar to accountants
and economists. A stock of knowledge may be thought of as a
quasi-permanent repository – such as a book or an entire library –
whereas the flow is the process of developing the knowledge. The old
Encyclopedia Britannica was quintessentially a stock; Wikipedia is the
paradigmatic example of flow. Obviously, a stock of knowledge is rarely
permanent; it depreciates like any other form of capital. But
electronic information technology is profoundly changing the rate of
depreciation. By analogy with the 24-hour news cycle (which was an
early consequence of the growing abundance of video bandwidth as cable
television replaced scarce over-the-air frequencies), there is now the
equivalent of a 24-hour knowledge cycle – “late-breaking knowledge,” as
it were. Knowledge is becoming more like a river than a lake, more and
more dominated by the flow than by the stock. What is driving this? 

Most obvious is the fact that the media by which electronic
information is presented and manipulated permit it to be changed
continuously and almost at no cost. Information products are therefore
constantly evolving, for the simple reason that, faced with the option,
who would not choose an updated over an outdated version? By the time
information products eventually come to rest, they are very likely to
be considered obsolete. In the cutthroat competition for attention,
they are no longer “news.” 
Consequently, there is little time to think and reflect as the flow
moves on. This has a subtle and pernicious implication for the
production of knowledge. When the effective shelf-life of a document
(or any information product) shrinks, fewer resources will be invested
in its creation. This is because the period during which the product is
likely to be read or referred to is too short to repay a large
allocation of scarce time and skill in its production. As a result, the
“market” for depth is narrowing. 
There is also under way a shift of intellectual authority from
producers of depth – the traditional “expert” – to the broader public.
This is nowhere more tellingly illustrated than by Wikipedia, which has
roughly 300,000 volunteer contributors every month. The upshot is that
thousands of heads working in parallel are, in an environment of
information superabundance, presumably better than one, even if that
one is an expert. 

What makes the mobilization of “crowd wisdom” intellectually
powerful is that the technology of the Web makes it so easy for even
amateurs to access a growing fraction of the corpus of human knowledge.
But while hundreds of thousands of Web-empowered volunteers are able to
very efficiently dedicate small slices of their discretionary time, the
traditional experts – professors, journalists, authors and filmmakers –
need to be compensated for their effort, since expertise is what they
have to sell. Unfortunately for them, this has become a much harder
sell because the ethic of “free” rules the economics of so much Web
content. Moreover, the value of traditional expert authority is itself
being diluted by the new incentive structure created by information
technology that militates against what is deep and nuanced in favour of
what is fast and stripped-down. 

The result is the growing disintermediation of experts and
gatekeepers of virtually all kinds. The irony is that experts have been
the source of most of the nuggets of knowledge that the crowd now draws
upon in rather parasitic fashion – for example, news and political
bloggers depend heavily on a relatively small number of sources of
professional journalism, just as many Wikipedia articles assimilate
prior scholarship. The system works because it is able to mine
intellectual capital. This suggests that today's “cult of the amateur”
will ultimately be self-limiting and will require continuous fresh
infusions of more traditional forms of expert knowledge. 

With almost all of the world's codified knowledge at your
fingertips, why should you spend increasingly scarce attention loading
up your own mind just in case you may some day need this particular
fact or concept? Far better, one might argue, to access efficiently
what you need, when you need it. This depends, of course, on building
up a sufficient internalized structure of concepts to be able to link
with the online store of knowledge. How to teach this is perhaps the
greatest challenge and opportunity facing educators in the 21st
century. 

For now, the just-in-time approach seems to be narrowing peripheral
intellectual vision and thus reducing the serendipity that has been the
source of most radical innovation. What is apparently being eroded is
the deep, integrative mode of knowledge generation that can come only
from the “10,000 hours” of individual intellectual focus – a process
that mysteriously gives rise to the insights that occur, often quite
suddenly, to the well-prepared mind. We appear to be seeing fewer of
the great synthetic innovations associated with names like Newton,
Einstein or Watson and Crick. 

THE AGE OF DIGITAL NATIVES 
So we decry the increasing compartmentalization of knowledge –
knowing more and more about less and less – while awaiting the great
syntheses that some day may be achieved by millions of linked minds,
all with fingertip access to the world's codified knowledge but with a
globe-spanning spectrum of different perspectives. The hyperlinked and
socially networked structure of the Internet may be making the metaphor
of the Web as global “cyber-nervous system” into a reality – still
primitive, but with potential for a far more integrated collective
intelligence than we can imagine today. 

Those of us who are still skeptical might recall that Plato, in the Phaedrus,
suggested that writing would “create forgetfulness in the minds of
those who learn to use it.” This is a striking example of a particular
kind of generation gap in which masters of an established paradigm can
only see the shortcomings, and not the potential, of the truly novel.
Today, the electronic screen, with its lack of linear constraint, its
ephemeral scintilla and its hyperlinked multimedia content, portends a
very different paradigm. How this may condition the habits of thought
of the so-called “digital natives” – who, after all, are about to
become both the custodians and creators of human knowledge – is one of
the deepest and most significant questions facing our species. The
challenge is to adapt, and then to evolve, in a world where there
continues to be an exponential increase in the supply of information
relative to the supply of human attention. 

Peter Nicholson is president of the Council of Canadian Academies 

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------  
“I get up every morning determined to both change the world
and have one hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning my day very
difficult.” - E. B. White. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Matunda Nyanchama, e-mail: matunda at hotmail.com 
Read my Blog: www.matunda.org
Visit: www.aganoconsulting.com -  for business information
Other: www.nsemia.com 

________________________________
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