This blog has not evolved quite the way I intended, but I have not given up on the concept. A new website is in the works that will turn this into a making info useful community. Stay tuned.
New Website Comming Soon!
October 4, 2009 · Leave a Comment
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The Relativity of Information
July 6, 2009 · Leave a Comment
“It depends”. That is an accurate way to the answer to the questions “What information is useful?” and “How should I communicate this information?”. Why? Because information is relative.
This post summarizes, and expands upon, a recent article by Dave Gray at his Communication Nation Blog.
DIKW Theory
First, what is Information? According to Data Information Knowledge Wisdom Hierarchy (DIKW), Information is Data that has been organized to provide meaning – usually answering questions such as “who?”, “what?”, “where?”, and “when?”. Information is useful because it contains relational connections between, otherwise insignificant, Data.
Pieces of Information are the fundamental building blocks for true meaning, understanding, and decision making, but they are not sufficient. According to DIKW, the next level of understanding and connection is Knowledge. Knowledge is essentially information that has been integrated into our minds, memory, and body. “Memorization” comes to mind and along with it, unpleasant memories of grade school. Nevertheless, Information can never be useful if it isn’t somehow committed into a person’s mind or body.
The ultimate level is Wisdom. To truly have understanding where there was no understanding before, to be able to judge right from wrong, and to derive value, one must have Wisdom. Moving from Knowledge to Wisdom is the most interesting part of this theory (for me), and as you may have guessed, the relativity of information comes into play.
Information Relativity
What does Information relativity have to do with Wisdom? Information relativity comes into play because Wisdom is highly personal. Derivation of value, judgment, and personal understanding are all unique [or relative] to individuals and situations. There are many factors that contribute to this relativity – I am going to call them “relativistic factors”, but this is something that I am making up because I have no better way to describe the concept (any help on this?).
The relativistic factors include, but certainly are not limited to, (1) values, beliefs, culture, etc., (2) context, (3) personal experiences, and (4) expectations of the future. It is clear that these factors are highly variable from person to person, yet all can fundamentally impact Wisdom. Therefore, it is entirely possible for two people to be exposed to the same collection of Information and absorb the same Knowledge, yet the Wisdom obtained by these two people may be different. The result of this could be different decisions being made in similar circumstances or a different understanding of the “truth”. Why would there be so many different opinions out there if this was not the case?
This is why the relativity of information is so important.
As an example, consider the following image which has shown up in many texts and courses over the years:
People usually see one of two women in this picture. One is an old woman and the other is a young woman. How can people see two different women in the same picture? Information is interpreted differently because people are different, and different conclusions are drawn as a result.
Implications
To be truly useful, Information must be used to create Wisdom. Here are two scenarios to illustrate the relativity involved in this process:
(1) Wisdom Communication
Wisdom communication is the scenario where you attempt to enlighten others by communicating your understanding of a particular subject. This is the scenario explained by Dave Gray in his post “Towards a Theory of Information Relativity“. Instead of paraphrasing, here is a direct quote from his essay:
So I propose the beginnings of a theory of information relativity
1. All information is relative, and it’s always relative: relative to the observer and the observer’s point of view; relative to the culture and its values; relative to the situation; relative to what has come before, and to what will come next.
2. The value of information is always relative because it is directly related to it’s usefulness, which depends on the user, the context and the situation.
3. Information design must therefore be driven by the context within which it will be experienced. Information design must serve the needs of real human beings doing real things. Information wants to be used.
At its heart, information design is about change. It’s about increasing the amount of useful information in the world. Good information design should result in changes to understanding – increases in knowledge and wisdom – which can be directly measured by observable changes in human behavior.
Said another way, communicators must seek to understand how relativistic factors will impact the transfer of Information and the transformation of that Information into Wisdom. They must adapt their Information to account for things like the current context, the beliefs of those to whom they are communicating, and their audience’s experience. Conversely, they must also consider how the same factors will impact their own understanding. Relativity works both ways.
(2) Wisdom Creation
Wisdom creation is the scenario where you have to sort through the vast universe of available Information, commit some of the more useful bits into Knowledge, and then extract and create Wisdom from it. Once again, the most useful Information – the pieces that will lead to true Wisdom – is relative to the situational context, your values/beliefs/culture, your experience, and your expectations of the future.
The relativity of Information makes Wisdom creation very difficult. Most Information does not come with footnotes explaining the context in which is was generated or the personal experiences of the person who generated the Information. Therefore, it is up to you (the person attempting to create Wisdom) to seek Information sources that have relativistic factors clarified, or you must fill in the blanks by seeking a variety of Information sources and synthesizing to the point where relativistic factors are minimized. The latter is most common.
This needs more explanation, but I will leave that to another post after I have had a chance to think more about this. I will finish with another example from the art world …
Cubism
The following cubism painting from Georges Braque communicates a lot of discrete pieces of Information – in this case you could call them “cubes”. These pieces of Information alone do not mean very much, but the entire collection does represent something. Assume that we are seeking the Wisdom of knowing what this picture represents. One, or two, or three pieces of Information may not be sufficient, but a couple of them are particularly important. The piece illustrating guitar strings adds a lot of context – there is a musical instrument. The lips also give us some important Information – this is a woman. And so on. Ultimately, we are able to figure out that this is a woman playing a guitar, but only because we are able to take context from one piece of Information and apply it to another. This is a simple example, but I believe it shows Information relativity at work.
If anyone has any ideas related to this concept, or additional sources I should read, please share!
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Tagged: Context, DIKW, Information Relativity, information synthesis
Advice from Penelope Trunk: Synthesize Information
July 3, 2009 · 1 Comment
I believe there is some truth in a recent post on Penelope Trunk’s “Brazen Careerist” web site. She believes that Information Overload is for “weaklings.” Successful people have learned how to synthesize information and avoid being overwhelmed by it. Penelope goes on to say that information synthesizers make quick decisions to either use information, or discard it (but they NEVER whine about it).
I suppose I am a little weak, because I do get bogged down by the symptoms of information overload from time to time (although I try not to complain about it). I have also become better at quickly processing what is and isn’t important to me. This process is at the heart of Making Info Useful, and it is something I intend to explore in more detail on this Blog. In addition to the change in mindset needed to quickly discard information that is un-useful, there are many tools and techniques that can help. The goal is to get exposure to MORE information, not less, and to more easily capture the bits of information that are helpful. This can be very powerful, provided that you are able to synthesize the information you are exposed to.
This brings us back to another one of Penelope’s posts from 2007. To yield maximu effect, information synthesizers are able to take the bits of useful information they read (or see, or hear) and create new, highly valuable, ideas. I am not aware of any tools that can help with this – it is all about using your brain. However, those with the capacity to do this will become much more effective once they improve their ability to pick out fewer, more useful, bits of information from a larger, more diverse, stream.
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Tagged: Information Overload, information synthesis
A Black Hole Between Data and Knowledge
April 16, 2009 · Leave a Comment
A post at The Infography Manifesto Blog sums up the problem quite well. According to this post, a “person dealing with information overload has difficulty finding information that’s relevant to help them make decisions.” It also defined information anxiety as: A condition “produced by the ever widening gap between what we understand and what we think we should understand… the black hole between data and knowledge… when information doesn’t tell us what we want or need to know.
A one-post blog by the same author of The Infography Manifesto aptly states that there are “175,000 new blogs created every day … and this is one of them.”
This has been said a thousand times in a thousand ways, but it resonates with me every time I read things like this. It also motivates me to spend time researching potential solutions to this problem.
My favorite part of the blog posting referenced in the first paragraph is a quote from Einstein stating that “we cannot solve problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” That is certainly true, and I have been reading about – and experimenting with – some fresh ideas. I plan to write more about this in future posts.
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Too much is not useful, even for animals
March 27, 2009 · Leave a Comment
According to scientists, people choose what they know when inundated with too much information. This makes sense to me. When faced with too much information, it is easier to go with something you are already familiar with than to sort through all the possible options. I know that I tend to go back to the same web site for travel information (www.tripadvisor.com) even though I know there are a lot of other good options out there. It turns out that people are not alone. Animals exhibit the same behavior. An article at insciences.org claims that animals stick with food choices that they know, even when provided with food sources of identical nutritional value. They may stick with a food source even when it is scare and other, more plentiful, options exist.
So how does this relate to making information useful? I believe it adds credibility to the argument that too much information is not useful. Information is only useful when it is filtered down to that which is most relevant. Once this is done, humans (and apparently most animals) can choose the most optimal option.
The problem is that there is not much out there to help us filter information, so of course, we revert back to what we already know. The result is that we unfortunately miss out on potentially better information. That is not very useful.
Update 3/30/09 – Here is a link to a better article
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Tagged: Information Overload
Context Matters
March 24, 2009 · Leave a Comment
When trying to narrow down the most relevant information from an otherwise comprehensible list of options, context matters. The Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing defines context as “that which surrounds, and gives meaning to something else.” Essentially, this means that our surroundings have an impact on what matters and what is meaningless. What is important in one context, may not be important in another.
This point is made most clearly through examples. Let’s start with location. A user’s current location can have a huge influence on what information is most relevant. Nokia’s “Location, Context, and Mobile Services” paper states that location is one of the most important pieces of contextual information. This paper says that so many things can be inferred contextually from a user’s location, including the weather they are experiencing, the traffic they are in, the language they are speaking, the price they are paying, the nearest cafe, where they were two minutes ago and what direction they are headed, and if they happen to be at a known point of interest (theater, church, etc.) then their current activity may also be known. Using this contextual data, information can be narrowed down to that which suits the users current needs most directly. For example, if the user is known to be in a grocery store, a contextually aware search for apples might return information on what fruit is in season this time of year, price comparisons, and recipes containing apples. Information about the history of apples, the Big Apple, and Johnny Appleseed could be easily filtered out. The key is that this filtering takes place without the user having to think about it. This is what makes contextual information filtering so powerful and useful.
The more contextual information the better. Knowing that a user is looking at travel information for business purposes vs. personal travel purposes will result in very different relevant information. A business traveler may want to know the weather, local business customs, good business hotels, or a place to take clients out to eat. A personal traveler may want to know sightseeing activities, the best resorts, and where to play a round of golf. Knowing that the user is sitting on a plane or walking down a street may also be relevant. The latter will need information that is much more concise and to the point. A user who is looking for information about “queen” while listening to classic rock is probably looking for something significantly different than the person walking around Buckingham Palace.
The examples are both endless and obvious. It is so obvious because people do this naturally. When asking for directions to the nearest Burger King, you don’t need to specify what town you are in – the other person already knows. This allows humans to communicate, and provide relevant information, much more effectively than computers. For this reason, getting information from other people is generally the fastest way to get what you are looking for. This makes the power of ones social network a key factor, but that is not the topic of this post. When the information you are looking for can not be obtained through other humans in a timely manner, people generally turn to electronic devices such as computers and smartphones. This is where the power of context is largely untapped. Despite the efforts of many to bring contextual filtering to the fingertips of the masses, commercial products and services with this capability are still in their infancy.
Location services are the most widely used applications with contextual data. In these applications, a user’s position is used to provide relevant contextual information. The most common services today provide information on nearby businesses of nearby friends. At the time of this post, over 1000 iPhone applications on the Apple App Store use location information to provide context.
[more than location context is important - add other types of contextual information]
[need to add survey of new research and products using context]
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Tagged: Context
The Problem: What Makes Information Useless?
March 22, 2009 · Leave a Comment
It is time to get this blog going. Before I spend time writing about how to make information more useful (i.e. solutions), I would like to capture some thoughts on the problems that cause information NOT to be useful (useless).
Here are five problems (please leave me a comment if you have some others):
#1 – Not Enough Information
In order for information to be useful, it must be complete enough to allow conclusions to be reached or decisions to be made. There are times when there just isn’t enough information available. Thankfully, this is rather rare in this day in age (unless we are doing new research). I won’t spend much time writing about this problem.
#2 – Information Overload
Information is not useful when there is so much of it that you can’t find what is really important in a given context. This is the complete inverse of problem #1, yet it has become a much bigger problem in the modern “internet age”. In fact, it has been said that information overload costs the economy $650 Billion per year.
The problem of information is a relatively recent phenomenon, but there were some that saw this coming. Here is a great 1971 quote from Herbert Simon that was recently discussed on the Knowledge Jolt With Jack weblog:
“…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 and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it” (Simon, 1971, Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World, p 40-41.).”
Information Overload is a big problem for me and I plan to write quite a bit about it.
#3 – Poor Communication
Sometimes good information is available, but it is not communicated well and becomes useless as a result. This is a huge topic in itself, but I will simply define the problem of poor communication as “useless information that would have otherwise been useful, had it been communicated better”. I realize that definition doesn’t say a whole lot, but I’ll follow up with additional posts on this topic to break it down further.
#4 – Inaccessible Information
How many times have you been in a situation where you need some information to make a decision – and you know that this information exists – but you don’t have access to it? If information isn’t accessible to you, it isn’t useful.
#5 – Wrong Information
Information may sometimes have all the characteristics of useful information except for one thing – it’s FALSE! False information, or misinformation, is not useful because it is misleading. This can be the most dangerous because it may lead to bad decisions.
#6 – Incomplete or Irrelevant Information
Incomplete and Irrelevant information can be worse than no information. [NEEDS TO BE FINISHED]
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What is MakingInfoUseful.com?
March 22, 2009 · Leave a Comment
This site is a place for me (and hopefully a few friends) to organize all our thoughts, observations, readings, links, etc. about how information can be made more useful. I love information, but I feel overwhelmed and overloaded by it sometimes. There is so much useful information available to us, but how do we get access to the right information at the right time? How do we keep track of it and organize it? How do we take large amounts of information and consolidate it into concise views that allow us to extract the most useful bits? In other words, how do we make it more useful?
There have been so many significant advances made in this area over the past decade. I intend to write about a lot of them. I hope to hear from others. I ultimately hope to find some patterns of information usage and communication that help myself and others.
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