I'll bump that +1 thread and rt (day 74)

Recently I asked Steve 'what is the difference between ice cream and gelato?'  He answered the question and added that he knew because I had told him.   Somehow I had transferred the knowledge to him and deleted my cache.  I was behaving as an information conduit with limited storage capacity.   Looking around I see that this is not an isolated phenomenon.  The proliferation of social media tools means that we are spreading information around more than we are storing it.  We've all become information amplifiers and dampeners.   The benefit to this is that we don't all have to read or experience everything.   We can read and experience our part and amplify what we think is interesting and then let the rest of the crowd filter down what they think is important toward us.  The detriment is that we may be less able to synthesize new knowledge.  If we are not holding deep knowledge in one or more areas, it's hard to understand how information from another field may be applicable to what we already know.   We are in danger of becoming dilettantes.   And this is the conundrum: there is more information than ever before but because it is not housed in our brains, it's not deeply held knowledge in a way that it can be productive.  It's as if we went from being experts at making things to being experts at networking.  I'm not making a case for more or less networking.  There just needs to be a balance between knowledge acquired and information sharing.  If we are all busy sharing information but not enough new knowledge is being acquired, it quickly devolves into a solipsistic exercise...a kind of cabin fever.

I've made a distinction here between knowledge and information.   I think of knowledge as something that an individual has.  Something borne out of experience, trial and error, experiment.  In contrast, information resides outside of the human body and can be stored, on a hard drive, for example.   Knowledge then becomes information as it gets shared in writing or speech.  It can become knowledge again as it gets absorbed and integrated by someone else.  Facts are a type of information which for the most part have never been knowledge.

We'll continue doing, recording, and sharing as always.  And as always, we'll wonder what and why.  What's changed are the proportions and the media.

A song for this post.

As the river flows (day 73)

Spending time with Alex has made me realize how crucial information management is.  She showed and spoke to me about how she organizes her emails and her notes and her blog posts.  She talked about the tools she uses, the filters, the habits, the idea cache.   She spends a lot of time with social media so in some ways she has more need for these techniques and tools than I do but still there were some really useful tidbits of information.  I've started using Evernote more since she showed me how she uses it.  I've downloaded an application called Skitch for taking snapshots.  I'm seriously thinking of filtering my mail more seriously than I have been.

At the conference there was a talk about the digital divide in which the speaker mentioned that after the distribution of technology is relatively achieved, the divide is more about the skills it takes to cope with the onslaught of available information channels.   After speaking with Alex I can see that it's a continuum with some people surfing the information flow with glee and skill.  Others (like me),  swim and splash around but definitely not with glee.   Having just joined Twitter, not only do I have to learn a new language but I have manage yet another stream joining in to the raging river.  I still haven't faced up to it.

I must say there is something exciting about meeting Alex.  Like downloading another application or buying a new tool.  I can't wait to see how it changes my life.

A song for this post.