Wisdom Ignorance of the Crowd
October 20th, 2008 by Natasja Paulssen
How do we value information?
One of the keynote speakers at Gartner’s Portal, Content and Collaborations Summit in London last month was Tara Brabazon. She was introduced as a possibly controversial speaker, well, I can tell you, half way through her speech the audience was in shock!
There was a lot of interesting stuff she talked about, but what got to me most is this. There is no such thing as the Digital generation that surfs the web and does not read anymore (versus the Generation X that by the way designed all the stuff the Digital generation is using). We are all reading less and less.
And you know what? I have to admit this holds true for me. I find I have trouble reading books where I used to devour thousands of pages before. I have got the attention span of a gold fish. (Some biology facts, which I did not check on Wikipedia by the way, a gold fish can barely remember his bowl after swimming full circle.) I always blamed this on my children, since it seemed everything got worse after they were born, but maybe it is just a sign of the times.
The second point Tara Brabazon made is that we (and not only the Digital Generation) do not know how to discern valuable knowledge from digital chit chat. On Wikipedia, the amount of information on Klingon surpasses that on Latin. Isn’t it obvious that the latter is more important?
We need to learn how to value information. Educators need to teach us how to find knowledge in these large oceans of information. Value of information all depends on context, on what you mean to achieve. So how do we judge that information on the band Franz Ferdinand is of less importance than Franz Ferdinand the person who started WWI? What makes information valuable?
In early days one of the aspects of information value certainly was accessibility. Only the monks could read and had access to books. Today we expect that information is freely available. It seems to me that accessibility is lost as a measure for information value. But the opposite, measuring information value by how many people like or use the information also does not feel quite right.
There is another aspect to the value of information: the rarity of the author. How many people in the world are able to create the information? This certainly still makes information more valuable. If there is only one person who can write it then information is rare, even if we can access it freely after it has been created. If the author of the information had to invest a lot of time in its creation or had a lot of competing tasks, then the information is also more valuable I believe.
And is it not true that we value information more if we are prepared to spend more of our time to consume it?
Maybe we can start measuring the value of information in time somehow? Time used to create, time spent to consume? Is that a start?
Entries RSS
Comments RSS
October 23rd, 2008 at 10:54
Measuring the value of information by the amount of time uses to either consume or produce it is indeed a start. But that would mean that, measured by the amount of information on the subject on Wikipedia, Klingon is indeed more important as a language than Latin. More people have spent more time writing about it.
But I would pose that *for the kind of people who add information to Wikipedia* Klingon is indeed the better language: it relates to one’s interests, gives the speaker a higher social status within his or her peer group and may be more amusing to learn. If the majority of Wikipedia editors were historians or linguists, the story might be different.
So: the amount of information on a subject is a measure of the time spent producing it. Lots of info = lots of time = lots of value. And if a website gets a lot of pagevieuws many people want to see what’s on it, so they spend time on the website, therefore it is valuable for them.
But that would mean that http://icanhascheezburger.com/ has more value than this site. Ridiculous!
Ah, well, the pics on that site make me laugh, and entertainment is a kind of value. So a useful question is: what kind of value do I want to create?
Better minds than mine; help me out here.
On company intranet with only work-related information, you can bet your lunch money that if the page on filling out form A127 gets the most hits, that page is the one with the most valuable information for the company’s employees.
Too bad that, if “pagevieuws = time spent on the information = the value of the info” is the way you measure your information’s worth, this measure is so easily skewed. All you have to do to make your article seem valuable is add sex/fluffy kittens/celebrity gossip.
So you don’t want to start rewarding the contributors to your intranet by the number of hits their articles get. They will start writing things like: “Our new CEO: Hot or Not?”
But how to measure “Can this information be used to benefit the company and/or make the world a better place?”
Nobody said Informatio management was easy.