Guest Voice: Information Overload and The Race For President
June 7th, 2007 by JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
NOTE: The Moderate Voice runs Guest Voice posts from time to time by readers who don’t have their own websites, or people who have websites but would like to post something for TMV’s diverse and thoughtful readership. Guest Voice posts do not necessarily reflect the opinions of The Moderate Voice or its writers. NOTE: Broken link has been FIXED on this post.
Information Overload and The Race For President
By Alex Hammer
Bill Gates a while back wrote a memo to Microsoft employees detailing a new era for software. Software 1.0 (not his term, but he does speak in striking terms about the shifting paradigm) was about getting consumers more information. Software 2.0, he states, which is the future of software and a huge market opportunity, is about organizing the information that we already have, so that it is useful.
Actionable.
I’ve never heard anyone accuse Bill Gates of being stupid. He knows, as we all do, that we’re inundated - overwhelmed - with information. I know people, for example, that refuse even to use email anymore because they just can’t get through all the spam.
Welcome the 2008 race for President. As the owner of Politics 2.0, which focuses on the race for President in 2008, how do we traverse across the sea of Presidential 2008 information to provide readers what is useful to them and the type of information they are looking for and want to know?
In this day of information overload that is the question we all must answer.
We seek to do it, most essentially, by being hooked into the broadest relevant network of informational sources upon which to draw upon that we can, and then employing developed processes and tools of sorting, analyzing and implementing those informational sources in an efficient manner.
I trust that the candidates for President are likely doing a lot of the same.
When you look at the websites of the top Presidential candidates they are generally well organized, but there are differences. Barack Obama has the most sophisticated online social network on his site, and as Politics 2.0 details, Obama competes with Hillary Clinton and yes, Ron Paul, for the most Internet traffic.
The use of video, across You Tube and the candidates’ own sites is becoming increasingly well organized, and the amount of “friends”, and the outreach to them, volunteers and event groups is highly developed overall.
It has been said that with the proliferation of information that we have in the world today, that even less informed individuals - if you can say that in relative comparison terms - have greater informational knowledge across topics than more informed people of an earlier time.
This is applied to information only, not wisdom. While whether this can be applied to the whole can be debated, when you look at even the number of minimum wage jobs that involve computer knowledge skills, peer across blogs and other websites and Wikipedia, etc., it’s clear that a lot of people possess a lot of information in today’s world.
A Presidential candidate who “get it” in this world as it now exists, may be the one who can best integrate at a more meaningful level of analysis this great amount of informational input.
As opposed to giving the best answers of yesterday, that may be by now outdated and no longer readily apply.
As we listen to the large range of Presidential candidates across the debates, ads, videos and other informational mediums, that is the realm of inquiry to which I keep returning. The “best” answers, if you will, understand context and integrate varying perspectives and points of view. They can be plainly spoken but they must be sophisticated. And forward thinking. I don’t see how we can understand the future, much less the present, if we do not have a synthesized handle on the types of information that is out there today.
That’s a significant part of what I’m looking for in my President.
This entry was posted on Thursday, June 7th, 2007 at 12:51 am and is filed under Ron Paul, Internet, Bill Gates, You Tube, Media, Barack Obama, 2008 Elections, Computers, Hillary Clinton, Politics. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
June 7th, 2007 at 1:34 am
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June 7th, 2007 at 6:26 am
We’re stuffed with information but starved for understanding, and the candidates should be giving us context rather than “bumper-sticker slogans.” But the pressure of competing makes that hard to do, as this week’s “safer since 9/11″ unfortunately illustrates:
http://ajliebling.blogspot.com/2007/06/safer-since-911-wrong-question.html
June 14th, 2007 at 10:26 am
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