Information overload is a gold mine

Some days ago I was being asked to prepare maximum two slides in which I explain why organisations should adopt social media tools in order to enhance information and knowledge sharing.  As a result, I came up with the following:

The amount of information will not stop growing in the near future. With new technological developments we can, for instance, use our telephone easily to submit messages and share knowledge via a Twitter or Facebook account. Or what to think about hard disk spaces. The total amount of gigabytes, or perhaps now even terabytes (which are available to you and me) are increasing every month. Networks are becoming faster through which it becomes easier to share information (from a song you can download within a couple of seconds to a movie you can have in more or less than 15 minutes). In 2003 the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California at Berkeley already gave an estimation that “the world’s total yearly production of print, film, optical, and magnetic content would require roughly 1.5 billion gigabytes of storage.  This is the equivalent of 250 megabytes per person for each man, woman and child on the earth”.

So what do we need to do. Do we need to make sense of information by letting librarians sort it out for us and we will then use it. No! First of all, this is a mission impossible to the librarians out there. Secondly, when the librarian thinks he or she has found the answer, it is most likely already out-dated. For example the existence of portals. In many organisations, librarians or information professionals are dedicated to the collection of valuable websites. They save these websites in a portal which they maintain on their own website. However, websites come and go and therefore there is a big chance the websites in the collection are out-dated or even not working anymore. Therefore I do not believe the information overload can be managed by one type of discipline (the librarian/information professional).

I believe that we need to cherish the information overload and that we don’t want to let individuals sort out this mess.  Firstly, because information overload result in unexpected opportunities. It creates less limited boundaries to the scope of your view and, as a result, make it more likely that you may find things you did not even think to look for. Secondly, because information overload results in future needs.  It is one thing to find something you did not know you need right away; it is a whole other skill to be able to recall knowledge that seemed marginally useful at best in the past, but crucial in the future.

In order to embrace this vision, it is crucial to implement social media tools. These tools let you easily recall knowledge or learn from things which were first completely out of your range because those things were just not a part of your narrow discipline. So don’t let librarians manage the information overload. Their  job in the future is to introduce peers how to use social media tools and which social media tools should be combined for the specific information need.  When people are becoming a part of a big network of social media tools, different and innovative information and knowledge is being stored and shared by people who you did not know beforehand.

Let’s give you an example by showing the next picture:

In order to explain the complexity of choosing which social media tools you should use, I would like to give the example I recently used in the weblog post “Getting started with Social Media” on www.mindjumpers.com:

“Many of us have played with Lego.  By mixing bricks of different shapes and colours, it is possible to build different objects (from cars and houses to space ships). This sounds like an easy thing to do. However, appearances are deceiving! In most cases, people cannot manage without the instructions to make sense of all the different bricks and decide over which brick should connect the other in order to build the particular object.

This small anecdote can also be translated into the issue of social media. Social media is everywhere and is increasingly shaping our daily life as a way to share and create new knowledge. With social media we communicate (by (micro)-blogging and social networking) and collaborate (by using Wikis and social-bookmarking) through different types of multimedia (by photo-sharing with Flickr and video-sharing with YouTube).  As a result, all these different tools – social media tools – create a lively environment where people can tell their own stories, connect with other people who are telling their own stories as well and, as a result, engage each other.

In order to create an environment where people engage each other through lively conversations, the trick is to successfully combine social media tools.  Businesses should make sense of all these different tools and decide which combinations will best work for them.  This means that there are different combinations of social media tools that can add value to your business. That is why it is difficult to only give one instruction (as highlighted in the Lego anecdote) to build a social media environment for the business. Social media expertise is required!”

Dia 2

The amount of information will not stop growing in the near future. With new technological developments we can, for instance, use our telephone to easily submit messages and share knowledge via a Twitter or Facebook account. Or what to think about hard disk spaces. The total amount of gigabytes, or perhaps now even terabytes (which are available to you and me are) increasing every time. Networks are becoming faster through which it become easier to share information (from a song you can download within a couple of second to a movie you can have within 15 minutes). In 2003 gave the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California at Berkeley already an estimation that “the world’s total yearly production of print, film, optical, and magnetic content would require roughly 1.5 billion gigabytes of storage.  This is the equivalent of 250 megabytes per person for each man, woman and child on the earth”.

So what do we need to do. Do we need to make sense of information by letting librarians sort it out for us and we will then use it. No! First of all, this is a mission impossible to the librarians out there. Secondly, when the librarian thinks he or she has found the answer, it is most likely already out-dated. For example the existence of portal. In many organisations, librarians or information professionals are dedicated to the collection of valuable websites. They save these websites in a portal which they maintain on their own website. However, websites come and go and therefore there is a big chance the websites in the collection are out-dated or even not working anymore. Therefore I do not believe the information overload can be managed by one type of discipline (the librarian/information professional).

I believe that we need to cherish the information overload and that we don’t want to let individuals sort out this mess.  Firstly, because information overload result in unexpected opportunities. It creates less limited boundaries to the scope of your view and, as a result, make it more likely that you may find things you did not even think to look for. Secondly, because information overload results in future needs.  It is one thing to find something you did not know you need right away; it is a whole other skill to be able to recall knowledge that seemed marginally useful at best in the past, but crucial in the future.

In order to embrace this vision, it is crucial to implement social media tools. These tools let you easily recall knowledge or learn from things which were first completely out of your range because those things were just not a part of your narrow discipline. So don’t let librarians manage the information overload. There job in the future is to introduce peers how to use social media tools.  When people are becoming of a big network of social media tools, different and innovative is being stored and shared by people who you did not know beforehand.

Let’s give you an example.

Social Media enhance Organisational Learning

I just read a ReadWriteWeb message about the creation of noise (information overload) through social media (MySpace, Facebook, Hyves, Twitter and so on) and why this noise is rather useful than useless. I summarize the - for me- most important points:

1) Unexpected opportunities
This is also referred to as 'serendipity' or even ' passive and opportunistic information acquisition'. These words all illustrate one common explanation and that is "the less limited the boundaries of your scope of view are, the more likely you may be to find things you didn't even think to look for".

2) Future needs
It's one thing to find something you didn't know you needed it right now, it's a whole other skill to be able to recall information that seemed marginally useful at best in the past at a time in the future when the need for it arises. The recall of passively collected information that was gathered purposelessly in the past and put it to use in the future is a particularly powerful form of intelligence. Therefore a person with a substantial collection of generally relevant information is a great person to have on any team. Twitter could be very helpful to recall this type of information among your network of friends/colleagues

3) Mazimining recall
Scientists say that is not necessarily the case that the more information you receive will lead to not remembering very much of it.

Source:
Is Online Noise Really Bad for You? Written by Marshall Kirkpatrick