IA i(s|n) the Future

This summary is originally published on Feb 11, 2012 at http://lauracreekmore.com/futures-ia/

Facebook is the largest photo repository in the whole world…and it isn’t their core mission. Talks about number of searches in Google, number of videos uploaded to YouTube. The numbers are too boggling for us to understand.

We are now in a place that we have always tried to achieve–ubiquitous access to information. Says it is a disservice to argue [like Nicholas Carr in The Shallows] that information overload is bad for us.

We don’t just have more information — we have more information, computation, devices and people.

How do we deal with all this information? Three ways:

• Deliberate structure — the IA approach.
• The Google approach — Computation.
• Coordinated group action — the Wikipedia approach.

Three new ways:

• Deep interaction — Not just touch. Why do we talk with our hands? Just like raising voice, pausing, it gives extra information. Why do we do it on the phone? Ah, it’s learned behavior. Why do people who are blind talk with their hands? Cognitive psych studies about this suggest that gesturing helps us think, and that not gesturing constrains our thinking.
  Embodied cognition tells us that thinking about our brain as the processor, the body as the output, and senses as input is a very limited view.
  Spectrum: One one end, mind and body are separate. Other side, mind and body are integrated with each other and the world around them — Fast says we’re far on the first side, and we need to shuffle over toward the integration side.
• Coordination — or orchestration. Our lives are about coordination.
  PHINGS — Physical, Haptic, Interactive and information-rich, Networked and Next-Generation, Stuff on Surfaces
  We coordinate information, but people, things, etc.
• Mess — Compares two images of Steve Jobs…one in spare environment that appeared in Time, an iconic image of “the genius at work.” The second, a photo of his home office, a complete disaster. Fast says mess is a fundamental part of how we work and learn. Why do we think order is better? Why is mess negative?

Fast: Information is cheap. Understanding is expensive.