Information Here, There and Everywhere

Remember the days where whenever we had a question, it would take quite some time to find the answer? Let me give you a couple of examples:

• When you go grocery shopping for your mom and the list says to bring beans. But you get there and find out there are 5 different types, which one do you get?
• When you hear a nice new song on the radio but missed the part where the speaker tells you the name of the band/singer and the name of the song. How can you find that information from just a line you memorized out of the song?
• When you were running late to meet a friend because the car broke down and you know you won’t make it to the 7:00 pm movie you planned to watch at the theater?
• When your friend who lives overseas tell you that they wrote you a long letter with photos of their vacation in Paris and sent it 3 weeks ago, “didn’t you receive it yet?”
• Whats on TV tonight? Where is that TV guide?

I can go on and on with that list, but I am sure you know by now what I am talking about. That was the pre-cellphone, pre-internet era. Where information was not that accessible and it took time, effort, and money to get it.

People like us who grew up during the 80’s and early 90’s (and before that) remember those days and remember how things changed once the internet came along and started to provide us with almost all the answers to our questions. Our lives in the internet/cellphone era has changed dramactically and our view to information and how to access it has changed.

With information being at the tips of our fingers, its hard not to be able to learn more about anything we want; if its medical, or about engineering, cooking, fashion, politics, economy, etc. All you need to do is type in what you want in Google and off you go into the sea of information.

The question I do ask sometimes is how much information can a person obsorb? Making information so accessible at anytime and anywhere can be overwhelming at some point if you cannot filter the information that you need from the total amount of information that you are being exposed to. Now, when I look up something in Google - for example a search about “Cloud Computing”- I end up with thousands of web sites that have something to do that topic; could be company web sites, tutorials, research papers, or blogs. Then I choose the one (or ones) that seems to be the best reference I can use.  What happens most of the time is, while reading about what I was looking for, I also end up finding something else I didn’t know about and the cycle of Googling goes on again. So, its an endless loop of information search.

This video shows very interesting facts. The things that really stood out to me the most were these two:

 ”There are 31 Billion searches on Google every month, to whom were these questions addressed before Google?”

“It is estimated that a week’s worth of the New York Times contains more information than a person was likely to come across in a lifetme in the 18th century”

In a lifetime? Imagine how much information we are exposed to everyday, how many questions we’ve been asking and how many times have you told someone to just “google it”?