Information Overload
“AYODHYA VERDICT RUNS INTO 8,189 PAGES
The final High Court verdict in the Ramjanmabhoomi-Babri Masjid runs into an staggering 8,189 pages. The three judges-Sibghat Ullah Khan, Sudhir Agarwal and Dharam Veer Sharma -gave separate judgements in the 60-year-old legal dispute on the ownership of the disputed land in Ayodhya. Justice Agarwal gave the lengthiest judgement that runs into 21 volumes totaling 5,238 pages. Justice Sharma too gave a detailed verdict running into 2,666 pages with separate judgements on four different title suits filed by litigants. The verdict also included five neatly indexed annexures running into 1,566 pages. Justice Khan was comparatively brief with his verdict running into 285 pages (Press Trust of India) “
How many of us went through it all? Are we planning on doing that anytime soon?
Today, information is the keyword that is moving and shaking society. We live in a world where information is everywhere. And I mean everywhere! We are actually in the era of information overload. Tell me one place where you can’t find information – even finding that is information-search!
Just type ‘information’ in Google and you get about 3,300,000,000 results in 0.09 seconds
1 million terabytes of data is generated annually = 100000 X 1024 GB = 10000 X (1024)2 MB
And 99% is in digital form and most of them are complex and dynamic.
The Times newspaper contains more information on a single day than what was accessible to a person in the 17th century!
A manager today accesses 2000 times the amount of information accessed by his counterpart in 1980.
An ‘internet savvy person’ accesses 34GB of information every day
Stunning, isn’t it? Now close your eyes and tell me what all you read above. I said ‘eyes closed’
Were you able to recollect? If yes, then how much percentage did you recollect???
Information is great! It is probably one of the differentiators in companies making profits too. It is exciting, new, gives you even a sense of power – but the biggest problem we have is not of ‘information-availability’ but that of ‘information-recall’.
Today people are almost drowning in information. They are bombarded on all sides by information. Not just any information, but complex information. And though there is so much of information available, many for ‘Free’ over the digital medium called the web, people spend more and more time in search and have less time to analyze the same. They also end up spending more time segregating between what is crucial and what is noise. The main goal of information is to produce knowledge in the recipient. But information overload creates a gap between the volume of information and the conversion to useful knowledge.
Information can be broadly classified into two parts – mental (the content) and material (how it is represented). People usually start the search for content by asking other people (whom they know – maybe trust!), then experts, then the web, then their databases and their storages. Now the ‘other people’ circle has become bigger because of the social networks (facebook, twitter, linkedin etc) and one can get answers direct from people. I remember searching for ‘Gerry Martin’ (who has a farmhouse in Bangalore, which people can visit with children) but could not get an answer from even google! So I went to the social network and got answers from facebook, linkedin and twitter – even from people who got to know about my search from their friends. So why people still top the search list? It is because people alone can share the information with emotion, feeling and add their experience and opinion.
We know that information needs to become knowledge for it to have any use. So the big question is how can you ‘present information’ to a varied group of people, so that they can receive it easily, be able to analyze it and slowly over time convert it into knowledge.
I am not going to deal with the content part of information but the material part. (the way it is represented)
Now, to understand this, we need to travel back in time. To the time when mankind began; when people gathered in groups and shared information through stories. Stories were not just used to share myths, legends and values – but they were the framework for transferring all kinds of information – information that led to creation of identity, uniqueness, culture and ways of living. As communities developed and established identities for themselves, storytelling became the chief method used to transfer information from one person to another, one generation to the next.
Soon this art of storytelling took on the next form: recreation of the story shared using Visuals. The walls of Lascaux, France and many other caves found by archeologists tell us how mankind used visuals, sketches and drawings to communicate information. These were the earliest form of written communication. And they all share stories; stories that were significant enough to be captured on the rock walls. The Aztecs, the Mayans, the Egyptians, the Dravidians and every early civilization then began to customize the visual communication with their own pictograms or hieroglyphics – branding a unique identity to their visual creations. This is identified as visual-verbal language, as it used a combination of visual images, symbols and established alphabets and numerals to communicate.
Then the Semites – Canaanites, Phoenicians, and Israelites created what is known as the first verbal language. This was the first step forward in the birth of documented language.
From then on, it was a race by each civilization to make their dominance over the world and one way was by making their language the authorized medium of communication. They developed alphabets, numerals, rules and guidelines and promoted their use inside their boundaries. Each society began to produce documented manuscripts and scrolls to establish the superiority of their language and to document the stories that made them who they are. Soon a new elite began to emerge – people who were literate (could understand and use the verbal language) and thus began a separation of the visual and verbal ways of communication. And as we know verbal began its dominance and was identified as the language of the intellect, the religion and the state. Then in 1455, Gutenberg invented the printing press and in that very year, 20 people could produce 25000 books and from that moment on, nothing could stand in the way of the verbal language. But as the use of verbal language grew across all sectors, so did their complexity. Scientific communities, legal establishments, religious bodies, financial institutions, educational communities and the like began to script volumes of complex materials – which could only be understood by a certain niche of people. Even the establishments created to teach people, worked keeping the principle of complexity as the vital guideline of intelligence. (Today literacy means adequate knowledge in writing, reading, counting, memorizing and accounting)
Thus we created a world of complex information.
And now we question, “Why is this information not making sense”
then wonder, “Why people don’t understand us”
and ponder, “How to communicate effectively all this information”
So is there a solution? Stay tuned…
