The rise of the information consumer

So here we are, 2008. We have Google, Flickr and Facebook. We have YouTube, MySpace and Twitter. We have more IM clients than you can shake a stick at, and enough Web content to sink a flotilla or two. How, I ask you, is anyone expected to cope? If your cell phone isn’t ringing, your smart phone is beeping, your IM is flashing, someone wants to see you on Skype and don’t even talk about your inbox mail count.

Google et al are all trying, very, very hard, to grab your eyeballs, your traffic, your airtime minutes. Content is king and the devices and sites that generate and transmit it are rising to the top of the sexiness pile. Problem is, half of what’s being generated is utter garbage. Vernon Koekemoer, bless him, is the poster child for the information consumption era — he’s been all over the digital world because he caught someone’s imagination. And while you may think it’s nice to have everyone and his dog in your address book, chances are these people are cluttering up your inbox, your Facebook, and your head, with more of said garbage.

I was horrified, very recently, to see someone on a mailing list laud someone else’s posts as well–researched, merely because he was exposing most of the list members to information they’d by and large not seen before. This would be fine, even fantastic, if said information wasn’t the worst kind of spin–doctored propaganda.

I’m prepared to bet, in a currency of your choice, that the people and companies that rise to the top in the next decade will be those that are most adept at consuming information. And by consuming I don’t mean marking all as read and hitting delete. I mean scanning, filtering, processing and analysing information to determine what is useful, what is useable, and what really needs to be consigned to the bonfires of history.

Taking information and turning into knowledge is neat trick that, as yet, all of our IT cannot do for us, not on any mainstream level at least. If we are to survive and thrive in the Information Age, we need to do this for ourselves, and become expert at it. We also need to teach our children to do the same. Given the rate at which we’re generating new content, more and more sophisticated means of dividing the dross from the data are going to be needed. And soon.