Thad McIlroy - The Future of Publishing

Summary "The Internet easily defeats advanced filters, delivering millions of words per second to brains that can process only 10 words per second."

                 - Peter J. Denning, Director of the Cebrowski Institute for Information and Innovation and Superiority at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA

"It's a vicious circle," Sabrina said. "People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder. But because they are going deaf, it has to be played louder still."

                 - From The Unbearable Lightness of Being
                   © 1984 by Milan Kundera

"Facts are the enemy of truth."

                 - Miguel de Cervantes, Man of La Mancha

I am not alone in making the distinction between information, knowledge and wisdom. More recently I see that some pundits add "data" to the front of the list, and something called "understanding" before "wisdom."

The message is the same whether you live by just three categories, or by four or five. At the core of the information explosion is just numbers and facts - raw and bare - subject to speculation and interpretation. When you are able to find context, then knowledge may result. If you have a brain that can interpret this knowledge, and extend the knowledge beyond its obvious implications, you may become wise. Few do. But then wisdom is not a commodity, as information is, and we can access the thoughts and writings of the wise from the Internet and a host of other sources.

It's clearly our good fortune that there is a great deal of data/information available on the Internet. And of course, as with this Web site, it is possible to take full advantage of much of this free information.

Can we find "knowledge" on the Internet? Perhaps. Wisdom? Less frequently. Nonetheless, there has never been a richer source of data and information than on the Internet.

The key issue emerging from the information explosion is that there is now too much information at our disposal. And so we need to approach our quest for data, information, knowledge, understanding and wisdom differently.

This challenge has two aspects. First is simply trying to improve our methodology of seeking data and information, and transforming that into knowledge, understanding and wisdom. The second is more mechanical and matter-of-fact. We need to learn how to filter the data that only distracts (spam being the most obnoxious example) so that we can get on with the task of understanding.

Why the Information Explosion Matters to the Future of Publishing

1. The last several decades have seen an essential shift in the raw material of knowledge, education - indeed of the creation and expression of culture. Moving from a position of never knowing if you had the answer, or whether the answer was available, or whether you were just searching the wrong sources, we now find ourselves in the reverse position. Is this information I have uncovered the definitive word on the subject, or should I keep looking? Is the source to be trusted (c.f. Wikipedia )? How do I assess this possibly tangential or inaccurate information?

2. The role of the author is thrown into question. If we can question our own methods of seeking information and knowledge, how are we to approach any other person's purported statement of fact, of truth, of knowledge?

3. Is a probable response to this challenge a shift away from knowledge-based publishing to entertainment-based: film, computer games, etc? If we can't be certain of the answers, we might as well enjoy ourselves.

4. How will people successfully restructure their daily lives to physically and emotionally cope with information overload? Many studies indicate that this is becoming an increasing source of stress and even illness, and certainly of declining productivity for most workers.

The Information Explosion

The information explosion attacks us from every angle. For example the Internet Movie Database has stated that it lists 1,039,447 individual film/TV productions, and some 2,306,334 names of people who have worked on these productions for a total of over 15 million individual film/TV credits.

Ah, perhaps you'd have no trouble absorbing this soupçon of film and TV credits. Well, according to Bowker, publishers in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand released 375,000 new titles and editions in English in 2004. Bowker's Books in Print offers a database of "over 5 million book, audio book, and video titles." For the ambitious reader, that's over 1,000 books per day just to keep up. My prayers go out to those who speak several languages!

There was a time when mankind's entire knowledge held in book form was less than a few hundred volumes. The notion of absorbing all of this knowledge within your lifetime was not in the least fanciful.

My colleague Gary Starkweather, best known as the inventor of the laser printer, spoke at the Seybold Conference some years ago and made two startling claims, as illustrated in his slides from that presentation:



This first claim is profound and unsettling. Though the statistics are dated, they point to the very clear idea that there is much more "information" available today. But despite the laser printer, much less is printed now than was a decade ago. I believe this to be the case, although Hewlett-Packard may not. We become accustomed both to reading on the screen, and to parsing the information offered.

More significantly, and perhaps more subtle way, "The Information Avalanche" tells another story.



A more recent report, published in March 2007 is entitled The Expanding Digital Universe . While sponsored by storage vendor EMC, it offers some additional figures: "In 2006, the amount of digital information created, captured, and replicated was 1,288 x 1018 bits. In computer parlance, that's 161 exabytes or 161 billion gigabytes....This is about 3 million times the information in all the books ever written....Between 2006 and 2010, the information added annually to the digital universe will increase more than six fold from 161 exabytes to 988 exabytes."



The report emphasizes the growth of audio and video data, which tends to skew the argument to some extent. But the trend is still startling.

I have a used book, published originally in 1971 (though now out of print), written by Mona McCormick, called The New York Times Guide to Reference Materials. It cheerfully proclaims that with all of the search technology available, and the "relatively" modest number of volumes, it is still possible to "know" all that has been written and discovered. She specifically states: "So, after all, the information explosion is still a challenge we can meet." Though obviously a false claim, it clearly represents the pre-Internet sense of how we could cope with the data at our disposal.

The Internet has laid waste to that claim.

The information explosion can not be "blamed" on the Internet; it existed long before that. But the Internet and the Web have greatly accelerated the explosion of published and available information. This is indeed one of the key characteristics of the Web: there is no limit (in practical terms) to the amount of information that can be published in this medium.

So why is this important to our exploration of the future of publishing? Simply stated, the information equation has radically changed. In order to get a handle on a subject, it's no longer significant to aim for the assimilation of large amounts of information. It's far more important to find the appropriate and authoritative tools and methods that also restrict the amount of information you're exposed to. Google is widely-considered to be the best search engine for delivering relevant information. Its mission is "To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." But it may represent a primitive breakthrough in this quest. Even Google's greatest fans admit to its many limitations. In 2004, Google claimed its site index increased to 4.28 billion web pages (I can no longer find an up-to-date claim, but it has become largely irrelevant). We can no longer determine how many pages Google misses. But this may be picking on the wings of flies. Google doesn't miss much, and it catches new pages very quickly. What it does miss - well, the value of those pages is worthy of a separate debate.

However, you have to be an expert Google searcher to find the best that Google has to offer. Many search terms, even for the expert, will often fail to harvest the most relevant material.

So, as you contemplate the truly vast information resources on our planet, pause twice: once to remember your own human limitations in absorbing that which you can access, and second in lamenting the many information sources that are somewhere between difficult and impossible to locate.

I come back to the central tenet of how to cope with information in the Internet era. The challenge is to find the information you need, to make sure that it is timely, and at least reasonably accurate (measured against the "New York Times " scale "All the News That's Fit to Print" -  whatever that might mean today).

The downside is that you will be inundated with tough-to-sift-through garbage.

The upside is that you will find facts and analysis previously available only to graduate students and their professors.

A further downside is that certain copyright holders are holding onto their data for dear life.

The Information Explosion and Serendipity

Many observers of Internet trends lament the ability of  users to filter data to their own interests, thereby filtering out so much else that might serve to broaden their perspective on the world as it unfolds. Most recently Cass R. Sunstein in his revised Republic.com 2.0 argues that "...people should be exposed to materials that they would not have chosen in advance. Unplanned, unanticipated encounters are central to democracy itself. Such encounters often involve topics and points of view that people have not sought out and perhaps find quite irritating." He repeats an often-stated argument "You might, for example, read the city newspaper and in the process find a range of stories that you would not have selected if you had the power to do so. Your eyes might come across a story about ethnic tensions in Germany, or crime in Los Angeles, or innovative business practices in Tokyo, or a terrorist attack in India, or a hurricane in New Orleans, and you might read those stories although you would hardly have placed them in your Daily Me."

The simple proposition behind this argument, that serendipitous encounters with the unexpected broaden one's perspective and possibly make us more questioning and involved citizens, is not worth disputing. I do however dispute the foundation on which this argument is based. It assumes first of all that traditional media actually did expose readers and viewers and listeners to ideas and information and points of view that might jolt them out of their myopic worldview. It also assumes that the Internet in some way inhibits serendipity.

I question deeply whether unexpectedly encountering a wire service story in a print periodical of a recent "terrorist attack in India" offers anything of value to the reader. The story will be brief and superficial. Context will likely be non-existent. Commentary will be provided generally by conservative commentators: American politicians and/or the current ruling powers in India. Does this make the reader a stronger participant in democracy?

It's true that Web users can easily filter out any and all stories about India with the tools now available. But, far more significantly, should they encounter information about what's happening today in India, they have at their disposal the richest resources in history to dig quickly and deeply into the story, and to discover a range of viewpoints never available from the North America media.

The information explosion can be blight or a blessing. Keep faith in the citizenry: those who care are becoming stronger, better informed and more empowered than ever before. Those who wish to doze, were dozing also in the era of one-newspaper towns and three major television networks.

References