Surfing Waves of Information
The internet has brought us the biggest and fastest information system ever known.
It allows us to communicate and interact freely (most of the time) with the outside world, with the numerous people around us and nowadays, more and more with machines or systems.
Although the internet, or the commercial web as known today, is a few decades old, the problem of attention was known prior to its birth.
In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. — Simon, Herbert A (1971).
In Designing Organizations for an Information-rich World, Simon denotes a few underlying problems that arise:
- Old words in new meanings
- The scarcity of attention
We will dig deeper into both these problems later. Stay tuned!