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blue bits. red rocks.
Sunday 28 February 2010

Access and finding aren’t particularly problems in the world of the Net and universal search, and many of the teaching strategies of the last age — memorization, repetition, a focus on information over application — all targeted at solving the problem of finding seem increasingly irrelevant. In under a second and without having to understand any bibliographical technicalities, I can type a search term into Google’s deceptively sparse search window and voilà! 50 million hits. It’s a level of access and ease of discovery unprecedented in human history — a new informational age. And this new informational age is cursed with a new problem: 50 million hits. It has become virtually impossible for a person to assess the quality, relevance, and usefulness of more information than she can process in a lifetime. And this is a problem that will only get worse as information continues to proliferate. But a quick look at popular technologies shows some of the ways people are working to address it. Social networking leverages selected communities to recommend books, restaurants, and movies. Context- and location-aware applications help focus search results and eliminate extraneous complexity. And customization and personalization allow people to create informational spaces that limit the intrusion of informational chaos. More than many other companies, Apple has understood this challenge for some time — and has leveraged these same popular technologies to help solve it. One has only to look at the ecosystem connecting the iPod and the iTunes store to see a prime example. Of course, Apple is not the only company to do so; Amazon, Google, and others have built similar solutions for people using their services. But with the iPhone and iPod touch, and now with the new iPad, I think we’re beginning to see something really interesting develop. Especially in the context of eBooks, I’m increasingly convinced that we’re at the dawn of a change as radical as that driven by Gutenberg’s invention. The iPad and Information’s Third Age

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