How do we think about information?

Question:
How do we think about information? "Conflict of information," conflicting information, information conflict: does the average person think deeply about information? Should they have too?

This morning on NPR I heard another vivid interview. And I paraphrase, “…there’s just a conflict of information from FEMA …”

Let your mind snap upon this profound statement and how well the phrase “conflict of information” describes the overwhelming information overload and Progress Paradox (by Greg Easterbrook) individuals feel today. A quick internet search produces these hit totals for the phrase “conflict of information” :
1000+ on google,
600+ on yahoo,
500+ on askjeeves,
600+ on alltheweb,
500+ on teoma,
1000+ on msn,
500+ on lycos
and on blogs: “0” hits of relevancy –this could be said for search engines also.

The web only being a quick barometer of currency, let’s flip into some major databases and see what we come up with:
5 in proquest,
1 in science direct,
0 in Wilson,
47 in ebscohost;
again the revlevancy of the information found could be questioned. While those may not be the best databases to search in, this is just a rapid way of cobbling together a mental picture on how far we need to go in making information meaningful.

These phrases “conflict of information, conflicting information, and information conflict” describes the tsunami of information in the world and the necessity of thinking about how to organize information for people or how to create Knowledge_Architecture for people to manipulate information, which is an Nth step beyond Information_Architecture.



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