Information-rich and attention-poor
I don't feel like commenting on this article right now because it's Sunday morning and I want to get outside, but it's a really well-written summary of how information-gathering is changing us and the idea of 'knowledge'. This is one of the most interesting parts of being a librarian - thinking about issues like this. Unfortunately, all I tend to see are calls for understanding or adapting, rather than actual suggestions on how to do so, but still, I thought it was worth sharing. I'm starting to think it might be worth having a whole blog just dedicated to posting articles, with the occasional commentary, on such issues.Some highlights (the italics are mine):
Knowledge is evolving from a “stock” to a “flow.”...A stock of knowledge may be thought of as a quasi-permanent repository – such as a book or an entire library – whereas the flow is the process of developing the knowledge...Obviously, a stock of knowledge is rarely permanent; it depreciates like any other form of capital. But electronic information technology is profoundly changing the rate of depreciation....Knowledge is becoming more like a river than a lake, more and more dominated by the flow than by the stock.
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Consequently, there is little time to think and reflect as the flow moves on. This has a subtle and pernicious implication for the production of knowledge. When the effective shelf-life of a document (or any information product) shrinks, fewer resources will be invested in its creation. This is because the period during which the product is likely to be read or referred to is too short to repay a large allocation of scarce time and skill in its production. As a result, the “market” for depth is narrowing.
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There is also under way a shift of intellectual authority from producers of depth – the traditional “expert” – to the broader public.
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What makes the mobilization of “crowd wisdom” intellectually powerful is that the technology of the Web makes it so easy for even amateurs to access a growing fraction of the corpus of human knowledge...the traditional experts – professors, journalists, authors and filmmakers – need to be compensated for their effort, since expertise is what they have to sell. Unfortunately for them, this has become a much harder sell because the ethic of “free” rules the economics of so much Web content. Moreover, the value of traditional expert authority is itself being diluted by the new incentive structure created by information technology that militates against what is deep and nuanced in favour of what is fast and stripped-down.
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The result is the growing disintermediation of experts and gatekeepers of virtually all kinds. The irony is that experts have been the source of most of the nuggets of knowledge that the crowd now draws upon in rather parasitic fashion – for example, news and political bloggers depend heavily on a relatively small number of sources of professional journalism, just as many Wikipedia articles assimilate prior scholarship. The system works because it is able to mine intellectual capital. This suggests that today's “cult of the amateur” will ultimately be self-limiting and will require continuous fresh infusions of more traditional forms of expert knowledge.
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Far better, one might argue, to access efficiently what you need, when you need it. This depends, of course, on building up a sufficient internalized structure of concepts to be able to link with the online store of knowledge. How to teach this is perhaps the greatest challenge and opportunity facing educators in the 21st century.
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For now, the just-in-time approach seems to be narrowing peripheral intellectual vision and thus reducing the serendipity that has been the source of most radical innovation. What is apparently being eroded is the deep, integrative mode of knowledge generation that can come only from the “10,000 hours” of individual intellectual focus – a process that mysteriously gives rise to the insights that occur, often quite suddenly, to the well-prepared mind.
