The other day, I was talking with an academic about the amazing amount of knowledge that we have in modern society and civilization. It truly opens doors to innovation, and things happen much faster. Consider if you will that back in the day when someone had an idea perhaps for a steam engine, it would take weeks to get a letter to the United States, or even around Europe to even explain the new concept to someone else. Then the other party would write a letter back and so on. Okay so let's talk about this shall we?
You see, I run a think tank, and it happens to operate online. I can come up with a new concept or original thought, and share it with one of the leading experts in the field within minutes. They can download the e-mail, perhaps take it with them to work, or sit in the coffee shop with a cup of coffee while they ponder the concept. Then they can shoot me a text message or e-mail on their iPhone giving me a couple of things to think about, or asking an additional question.
At that point I could easily send them back the answer by e-mail, and it will be sitting for them when they get home from the coffee shop, work, or dinner and a movie. These tools and the flow of information has increased the amount of innovation and the speed at which it comes to market (obviously).
However, there is a downside as well. Consider if you will that all the information ever recorded in the recent past is now online. Many of the old books and manuscripts have also been digitized by Microsoft, Google, and others, and it too is all online.
Then there are the political pundits, the political researchers, and those that have a need to drive their own agenda. All of this is also online, interspersed with politically correct talk, studies, opinions, and comments. We have a deluge of information; so much of it is irrelevant. It's just people communicating and talking about nonsense or nothing.
If we take all the irrelevant information and the false knowledge and we were to remove it from the Internet, along with all the duplication, how much would still be left? I would submit to you that we wouldn't need the over 1 trillion webpages we have today. But as it stands, it appears that we must sift through the deluge of irrelevance and false knowledge daily. I would contend that because of this, it is clogging the wheels of society's advance and forward progression. Therefore we may be regressing in our quest to speed up innovation at this point.
You see, I run a think tank, and it happens to operate online. I can come up with a new concept or original thought, and share it with one of the leading experts in the field within minutes. They can download the e-mail, perhaps take it with them to work, or sit in the coffee shop with a cup of coffee while they ponder the concept. Then they can shoot me a text message or e-mail on their iPhone giving me a couple of things to think about, or asking an additional question.
At that point I could easily send them back the answer by e-mail, and it will be sitting for them when they get home from the coffee shop, work, or dinner and a movie. These tools and the flow of information has increased the amount of innovation and the speed at which it comes to market (obviously).
However, there is a downside as well. Consider if you will that all the information ever recorded in the recent past is now online. Many of the old books and manuscripts have also been digitized by Microsoft, Google, and others, and it too is all online.
Then there are the political pundits, the political researchers, and those that have a need to drive their own agenda. All of this is also online, interspersed with politically correct talk, studies, opinions, and comments. We have a deluge of information; so much of it is irrelevant. It's just people communicating and talking about nonsense or nothing.
If we take all the irrelevant information and the false knowledge and we were to remove it from the Internet, along with all the duplication, how much would still be left? I would submit to you that we wouldn't need the over 1 trillion webpages we have today. But as it stands, it appears that we must sift through the deluge of irrelevance and false knowledge daily. I would contend that because of this, it is clogging the wheels of society's advance and forward progression. Therefore we may be regressing in our quest to speed up innovation at this point.
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