Reading my news feed from Facebook this morning, I realized how blessed I am to live in a world where the friends I know are so passionately interested in their world, and in sharing their knowledge and thoughts about it. These friends inspire me to share, learn and grow – although not necessarily in that order. There is no major order to doing this – living.
Random articles that people come across about the news, science, art, design and spirituality are as important to me as the oxygen, food and drink I consume. Those snippets somehow keep me alive and motivated and connected to the world when times get tough; I know I’m an information junkie and I’m working on changing that, but the links I read from others help me understand the world. The fact they come from authoritative voices (i.e. someone else has read it, and thought it important enough to share) makes it so much easier to evaluate and understand the world. I blame my fascination with information on working with my friend Jack doing information management consulting, but think I’ve just always been in love with the bits and bytes my whole life 😉 That and minoring in philosophy and psychoanalytic thought – that did it to me too. I think about information a bit like the scene in the Lady Gaga video for Bad Romance (above) where she’s standing still but jewels are all around her, and the camera spins around here – information is all around us, just waiting to be understood and experienced. I used to joke that I ended up in technology consulting – and in particular, Web design related consulting – because it allowed me to keep my addiction to the Internet alive *and* get paid at the same time. Now I realize that it’s more that I’m addicted to both the information itself as well as the comprehension of it – and that the reciprocal relationship between the world we live in and experience and our comprehension of that world will always been linked intimately.
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hat linking is something that I wrestle with professionally. I work with clients to help figure out how best to wrangle, tame and hold down that information. Sometimes it’s about the design and presentation of it. Learning how to communicate effectively with that information, or designing the information so that it too can communicate well. Increasingly with the large data tsunami that’s about to overtake us, it’s not only wrangling the information but learning how to tap into the right information – even to identify the data siloes and the information within them is a task that’s just incredibly daunting, and seems to have no end in site. The battle for water and the war over information are what are in store for us in the coming years – so definitely keep your blankets and cups out there, because I foresee battles on both fronts.
As much as the information and its relatives Data and Knowledge are sources of concern, that comprehension of the information does give me hope. That’s what set me off to blog on this today – a random list of friends that I’ve accumulated, and that I’ve gotten to know and continue knowing them by how they share that information and what they share. The information in isolation is important – it’s the jewel that lives around Gaga in that picture above. I’d like to think though that that understanding of the information comes from the people who interpret it – that by sharing what we know we grow as individuals and as a collective. Together we share the jewels of information as we experience it, all around us, as we dig in the ground that we call experience. Our comprehension is what makes us like Gaga in the video – not crazy costumed divas, but more like ‘fully alive, empowered, colourful and dynamic people’. We can often feel paralyzed by that information, but maybe, just maybe if we are willing to share the jewels that we come across we can all grow a little more brightly and have our understanding be a little more sharp.
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