Recently I've read
CNET article
Lickder's vision of the Digital Age. It is about J.C.R. Licklider, who in 1960 in his essay "
Man-Computer Symbiosis" predicted many trends of
integration computer systems in our life. I haven't read this essay yet, but want to say some words about symbiosis between people and computers. It will be interesting to find what my opinion will be after reading essay :-)
Computers are
intrinsic part of our life. Banality but true. All people in developed countries depend on computers. Computers help us to manage such important for our civilization structures as electricity, telecommunication, transportation and many others. Computers have changed the way of life in civilization, and as a result they have
changed people. It is
Net Generation people, who grew up in time of raising
information exchange, ability to easy communicate with people all other the world, collaborate with them, constantly being online with your friends. Net Generation is much more apt to share useful information by
wikis, publish thought by
blogs and much more. Though most of these people prefer to communicate by Internet, not by real meeting.
Net generation, as I think, is a beginning of
Information Society (
IS). Information is not a hard good, it can be easily moved from one point to another and cloned for no price, etc. The one in
IS is receiving tons of information, but only small bits of it are useful for him. As a result she needs to read information quickly and find there which she needs and truncate all other. What is more desired is the skill not simply truncate useless information, but if in future comes situation, where it is useful rapidly extract from the memory that you have seen something on this theme and can find it in archive.
However, you can say that that skill have been desired for all people who work with big amounts of data, even those who lived in Ancient times. And your are right. Though, my opinion is that in
IS this skill plays a vital role in success. In the past you have to have great
experience to make something difficult. While great experience is still highly valuable, you can find in Internet a great amount of information about your problem and what is more advices of professionals. So you can avoid many mistakes of your predecessors. Knowledge itself in
IS isn't a private information available only for limited amount of people. While some information of course is kept in a secret, in general you can easily find in Internet almost all you need. And what is more, you can easily
exchange your ideas and discoverings with others, taking part in growth of Database of Knowledge.
So the main point in
IS will be the ability to share ideas, thought, information and other intellectual goods, providing others the ability to modify them, make them better. A group of people works better than single, but in
IS you don't have search for people who will help you. They find information by themself, analyze it, use it, modify it, tell about if to others and much more...
Are you in Information Society? Are you sharing and developing your knowledge with others? If not, don't you think it's a good time to start make one more useful thing in a life, and help others by you knowledge?
