DAVID GELERNTER

What are people well-informed about in the Information Age?

Let's date the Information Age to 1982, when the Internet went intooperation & the PC had just been born. What if people have been growing less well-informed ever since? What if people have been growing steadily more ignorant ever since the so-called Information Age began?

Suppose an average US voter, college teacher, 5th-grade teacher, 5th-grade student are each less well-informed today than they were in '95, and were less well-informed then than in '85? Suppose, for that matter, they were less well-informed in '85 than in '65?

If this is indeed the "information age," what exactly are people well-informed about? Video games? Clearly history, literature, philosophy, scholarship in general are not our specialities. This is some sort of technology age — are people better informed about science? Not that I can tell. In previous technology ages, there was interest across the population in the era's leading technology.

This is a response that has gotten me to thinking, as it touches on areas in which I have a strong interest...

He's right, in part, I think. I believe that we're only just on the cusp of entering the "Information" age, and have recently been living in the "Data" age. The explosion of technology to sort, process and create vast quatities of data have really made us advanced tool users, but the utility has limits. The generation we're entering now is the one which will give us tools that are capable of transforming our data into information. Of taking the raw material and offering up something which can be acted upon and used. Without a doubt, this site, and it's brethren, are the initial steps in that direction.

Modern, connected individuals have access to vastly more data than any past generation, both secondarily (in computer memories) and primarily (in their own brains). What they don't necessarily have is the capacity to organize, correlate and recall those data. The perception expressed above derives from this very fact... we seem less informed because we've absorbed too much. Limited sources allowed for simpler analysis. The virtually unlimited sources available to us now make even tentative certainty a goal requiring more time and effort than in the past. Couple that with the known fact that those sources are of widely variable and often unknown quality, and the job becomes even harder. The tools don't exist yet to really alleviate this problem, but as they come into being, we'll become capable of astonishing things.

David Gelernter surely understands all these things better than I... his writings and his company are (were? the site www.scopeware.com appears to be a squatter) based on the solutions to data overloading.

Our
brains may never be well-enough equipped to understand the universe
and we are fooling ourselves if we think they will.

Why should we expect to be able eventually to understand how the
universe originated, evolved, and operates? While human brains
are complex and capable of many amazing things, there is not necessarily
any match between the complexity of the universe and the complexity
of our brains, any more than a dog's brain is capable of understanding
every detail of the world of cats and bones, or the dynamics of
stick trajectories when thrown. Dogs get by and so do we, but do
we have a right to expect that the harder we puzzle over these
things the nearer we will get to the truth? Recently I stood in
front of a three metre high model of the Ptolemaic universe in
the Museum of the History of Science in Florence and I remembered
how well that worked as a representation of the motions of the
planets until Copernicus and Kepler came along.

I tend to not care for these guys, but this one is interesting.