- If Information Is Air, How Long Can You Hold Your Breath?
- Ninety-Three Percent of New Information Is Born Digital
- Defining the Alphabetic Matrix
- How Information Behaves
- Information Order on the Web and Why That Order Is Constantly Changing
- How to Use the Web's Potential When Formatting Information
- Summary
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Ninety-Three Percent of New Information Is Born Digital
Designing information for digital environments isn't a trendy fad. It's a necessary new skill. Digital-born information is nearly all the information we generate. This is a fact of life that many of us haven't caught up with. But it's catching up with us.
We have come to this digital world, as we always do, carrying the mind-set of the world where we grew up. We come from printed documents, books, magazines, and newspapers. This alphabetic and word-based world is where we have lived for centuries. We will not abandon the world we came from; but our new world does not behave in exactly the same way.
Information does not typically come with instructions. Now that we sense that we are generating too much information, we have run headlong into the well-worn Einstein aphorism, "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them."
What's wrong with information, as it is presently formatted, actually has nothing to do with the information itself. There is nothing inherent in information that creates comprehension and management difficulties. Our bodies manage it quite nicely. Most of us don't run off to our doctor and demand that the information transfer between our brain and spleen needs an adjustment because we find it overwhelming.
This is because our bodies, to use a phrase popularized by Dr. Deepak Chopra, manage information flow through "fields of intelligence." These are nonverbal fields that operate at the subconscious level and send and receive trillions of information packets at once. But as we create outside ourselves a distant mirror to the complexity already operating within us, we have unconsciously assumed that our verbal matrix will suffice to manage all our information needs.
The plain fact is, it will not.