Blockchain Bachelor’s Thesis – Information Overload and Methods of its Elimination in the Modern Information Society: Going Through the Sources pt. 3

Source

Previously published

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Introduction

Blockchainized Bachelor’s Thesis
Blockchainized Bachelor’s Thesis – Initial Brainstorm

Thesis

1. Preface

Sources

1.Battling Information Overload in the Information Age
2.1.The knowledge-attention-gap: Do we underestimate the problem of information overload in knowledge management? pt.1
2.2.The knowledge-attention-gap: Do we underestimate the problem of information overload in knowledge management? pt. 2
3.Database Research faces the Information Explosion

Article

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KORTH, Henry F., SILBERSCHATZ, Abraham. Database Research faces the Information Explosion. Communications of the ACM. 1997, vol. 40, no. 2, s. 139-143

Database Research faces the Information Explosion

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This information explosion is often credited in large part to the combination of

1. Low-cost computing and storage devices
2. Low-cost internet access that potentially allows all the computing and storage devices to be connected even when they are mobile.
3. The availability of simple, easy-to-use interfaces (e.g., web browsers).

The author should have stated that those aspects are only relevant when regarding the latest information explosion. Otherwise it is a nice summarizing list of parts that together enabled the digital information explosion to occur. It actually surprises me that the list is so small, yet it pretty much captures all the important parts. Is there more to it? Probably yes but I haven’t come up with any addition on my own. The exponential growth of information uploaded and stored on the internet and its servers is only possible due to very low cost, while they are accessible from any given smart device. Also the fact that not only geeks are able understand it enables the whole humanity that have access to the gadgets and the internet to dive into the information that is uploaded there…voila…

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“These developments increase the significance of societal questions of privacy rights, rights to review personal records, intellectual property rights, rights of universal access, and so on, while generating challenging technical problems in data storage, organization, and access.”

I love it how even 10 years ago it was obvious to some that those important societal questions will occur. What startles me is that we, as humanity, have not yet tackled them in an effective way. I find it hard to add anything else if I want to remain objective. To me it seems like people as of yet don’t really care for unknown reason (it can be that majority of them are stupid, don’t find the question important as their information literacy is still low – lack the knowledge, they know about the problem but choose to support totalitarian ideologies of spying and controlling, or they simply are just too busy with their lives to start thinking about this issues).

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“The proliferation of computers and internet access have resulted in much of the general public being able to publish documents throughout the world without any lead time. As was the case for the printing press, the ability to disseminate information has been democratized - to an even greater degree. Publishing is no longer necessarily a corporate activity. Information can appear, change, and disappear without any central knowledge or control. The new immediacy of information creation and access is analogous to the change effected by telephony.”

The author says democratize where the real meaning of his word is decentralize (even though back then nothing like that globally existed). Instead of big corporations holding monopolies on the “information dissemination field”, suddenly that ability was for the first time in the hands of the people themselves. Don’t get me wrong, it was possible even back them to produce information with the intention to share it, but the effectivity was simply terrible. Now with the emergence of decentralized platforms (some of them even concentrating mainly on information dissemination) the decentralization is even greater than it has ever been (maybe except the very early stages of “open access internet”). Where is the limit? Is there any or will the efforts of making it once again more centralized prevail and succeed?

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“It is noteworthy that information revolutions predate the computer age and that, therefore, the computer is not a prerequisite for information to have dramatic societal impact. In earlier times, huge organizations emerged to manage information: libraries, cataloguing systems, publishing companies, etc., along with procedures to review and certify information such as scientific peer review. None of these were perfect - errors crept in and useful information was at times inadvertently (or intentionally) made inaccessible, but on the whole, the organizations and procedures that emerged helped (and continue to help) people in coping with and benefiting from the proliferation of information.”

True that. Even though it is noteworthy that the computer has changed the “rules of the game” so drastically that all those mentioned institutions had to adapt in order to even survive. Also, most of them are adapting really slowly and are being used less and less, even though they haven’t died out yet. The publishing companies and scientific peer review also have to face a major competitor. Publishing companies struggle against the digital environment greatly, whereas I predict that scientific peer reviews will face difficulties due to decentralized peer reviewing platforms.

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“Though the popular press often trumpets the dawn of a new „information age,“ it is instructive to consider the historical series of information ages that precede this one and to learn from society’s responses to those earlier challenges.”

I would argue that studying what the author wrongly names “preceding information ages” (will actually speak about that in the next part of my thesis so I won’t waste the time, nor space, here) will be of close to no use. As I said, the computers and internet has changed the “rules of the game” so much, that it would be like studying which heroes in any given game were good 5 patches ago (hope you get the metaphor).

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