Information Superhighway - An Infoboon or InfoBog?
Business News 23 June 1995A few weeks ago my mail didn't get through to my West Perth office. No, Auspost was not at fault. Fact was, a huge traffic jam on the information super highway (Internet) was blocking my email messages from arriving or leaving.
Uni students had just returned from break and, as usual, jumped en masse onto the Net and the highway was chockers. Just like 5:15 Friday evening on the Narrows Interchange. Bumper to bumper messages, trickling slowly one by one to clear the backlog.
So my email messages that took only 2 seconds to get from Vancouver or Oslo to Perth, took 2 days to get from Perth to my computer in West Perth.
The Net is the world's largest facility for you and me and the 6 billion other people on this planet to access, send, retrieve, read, and store information. Last I heard, the Net has over 40 million users.
We access all kinds of information - words (eg, Encyclopedia Britannica), CDs (Sting), video programmes (Rolling Stones Concert), statistics (ABS), government info (tax forms, licence applications, opinion polls), artworks (Bill Gates has the Mona Lisa on disk), how-to manuals (from automobile maintenance to growing zinnias), university courses (from anatomy to zoology) and more.
As long as someone puts the info into a computer with an electronic address, you and your aunt Henrietta can find it, bring it into your own computer, and use it how you like.
The Net is easy to access, easy to send, easy to jam up. So easy that the amount of info flying around the Net every second of every day is incomprehensible already. And the Net has been readily available to Perthites for only 18 months or so.
Because there are very few rules (NETiquette) about using the Net, the system is open to abuse. Unsolicited mail used to be called junk mail; it's now Spam.
Surfing the net can be a wondrous journey to unknown places, people, and propaganda. (A Spanish-speaking friend in Fremantle last week found herself linked into the Office of Communications in Quito, the capital of Ecuador, reading their latest military and trade communiques. She is not certain how she got there, but found their views on world events "very different to ours .")
Relying on a large number of people and institutions around the world to keep me informed on the latest political, social, and economic trends in their speciality, I receive about 20 to 30 items of snailmail daily. Plus 2 or 3 journals and magazines.
On the Net, I now receive up to 50 news items and 40-50 email messages daily. Plus the usual snailmail journals, magazines, and letters.
I do not have time to read it all. I certainly do not have time to sort it into useful and not useful information. I am not alone in suffering from Information Overload.
Or Infobog, as I heard in USA recently Soon we will all be finding too much unsorted, unfiltered, raw info landing on our electronic doorsteps.
As the information superhighway zips and zaps its way through our business and suburban lives, is it time to question the mounting road kill? The info burnout? The infobog?
Perhaps our greatest IT&T task is to create new methods of pre-sorting what info we receive and what info gets junked before we have to ideal with it.
The key question then becomes: who does the sorting, and on what basis. Knowledge is power; information is the building block of knowledge.
As Peter Drucker wrote in his Post Capitalist Society, knowledge is replacing capital as the very basis of all wealth.
Whoever controls information becomes the new power elite of the 21st century. Who should it be? The government? Can't happen; they along with all bureaucracies are increasingly losing control of information. The big IT&T powers, such as Bill Gates at Microsoft? Or the publishing/distribution giants such as Kerry Packer, Murdoch or Canadian Conrad Black?
Do we want them controlling a large part of our lives ?
The information superhighway will get bigger and faster. Traffic rules are needed. Who will be the highway cops and who will make the traffic laws ?
Big questions needing big thinking and strong answers, right now.
Meanwhile, back on the Net, I find cartoonist Michael Leunig has penned:
Little Sally, (what a pet!)
Surfing on the Internet;
A system recently invented
To get in touch with the demented.
idear old Grandma, (what a darling)
Screeching like a drunken starling,
Demonstrates a safer venture:
Surfing on your own dementia.
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