[Sigia-l] Information-centered Design

[Betsy Martens]

I wonder what V. Bush meant by the means "used in the days of the
square-rigged ships." Navigation charts? Ships' logs? We can extract
information now at supersonic speed, but finding that passage in that book
that held such meaning for us at the time we read it (contextual in each
instance) is in many cases still best accomplished by walking over to the
bookcase, pulling the book out, and flipping through the pages.

So are we that much further ahead? We have the ability to generate much more
information, and we have the ability to process much more information, and
to shrink it down to sizes smaller than the head of a pin, but when it gets
right down to it there's still limited capacity for processing that
information *and* plucking meaning from it.

I do agree that we've certainly progressed since 1945, and we have tons more
gadgets, and generations of gadgets that have come and gone since 1945, but
I think V. Bush had the gist of it right. He'd no doubt be pleased at our
progress, but I bet he'd issue the same kind of proclamation, with perhaps
an update to the square-rigged ships.

Betsy

on 4/5/03 12:54 AM, Listera at listera at rcn.com wrote:

> "Betsy Martens" wrote:
> 
>> "The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate,
>> and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the
>> momentarily important item is the same as that used in the days of
>> square-rigged ships."
> 
> I beg to differ. That might have been the case in 1945, but a lot has since
> happened. The sheer magnitude of information available in every imaginable
> subject via the Internet to ordinary citizens is mind boggling. Just look at
> the war being waged by the other Bush: GPS, 3D flythroughs of the terrain
> from satellite photos, real-time battlefield analysis, night vision,
> automatic cell phone scanning, etc. We generate information at an alarming
> rate but to say that our tools to deal with them are lagging by orders of
> magnitude is not correct. From medicine to war making our ability to thread
> through the mountains of information is progressing at a respectable pace.
> 
> Ziya
> Nullius in Verba