Guenther Krumpak: The Book and The Internet - the Antithesis between Paper and Electricity

KISK - Blok expertů

The Book And The Internet

Guenther KrumpakITBeurope

MU Brno, Feb. 27, 2014

A writer, speaker, preacherStudies of English, French & Italian Lingusitics & literature in Vienna

As a journalist stumbled into ICT. Discovered Europe's digital achievements and started to write about them.

Moved to CR in 2007: The old desire to experience a former „Eastern Block“ country. Fell in love with Prague and started to write about the city.

Who am I?

In Part 1 we're talking about

Information ManagementWe'd rather talk about Information „ovládání“

Why?What is information?Information, in its most restricted technical meaning, is a sequence of symbols that can be interpreted as a message

We are receivinginformation all the time

What IS information?

Everything we acknowledge with our sensesIn a human context, anything that we perceive via

Sight Hearing Taste Smell Touch

In a more restricted meaning, coded content - written, visual, auditiveIn a corporate context, data - facts&figures, reports, technology, science

From information to knowledge

Information knowledge = I can use it now and in the futureWe structure and store information to be useful for us and our environment

I see a red car: „There is a red car“

Option: The information is stored, but we forget itOption: „That's the red car I always wanted“Option: „Watch out when you cross the street“Option: „Finally my friends arrive“

Information as such has no value unless we process it - we must acknowledge it and put it into a context

Information is constantly growing

Národní knihovna: 6 million documents Austrian national library: 10 million objectsLibrary of Congress: 120 million itemsWikpedia: 30 million entriesNewspapers: 600 million copiesWWW: 630 milion websites (Dec. 2012)Plus: TV, radio, newspapers, all other media(posters, public advertising etc.)

How shall we manage that?

We are heaping new information upon new information

Once more: Information management is

Do you agree?

Please help me:Who profits from this activity?

turning large amounts of diverse information into useful and well organised units for the profit of organisations of any kind:university, company, shop, lawyer, hospital, public administration etc.

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/communications/internet-minute-infographic.html

Examples

Examples

Schematic of Information and information flow during production stage. ASLIB, The Association for

Information Management www.aslib.co.uk

Examples

Examples

„Pracujeme a žijeme v době, ve které jsou nejcennější informace. Bez ohledu na jejich typ a význam si však musíme uvědomit, že jsme schopni vnímat a účelně tedy využít jen omezený informační toky, které k nám proudí všemi dostupnými komunikačními kanály.

Zásadní tedy je, dle zákonů logistiky, mít informace v potřebném množství a kvalitě ve správný čas a na správném místě tak, abychom za přiměřených nákladů mohli uspokojit naše zákazníky.“

Realita však může vypadat i takto:

www.dynamicfuture.cz/en/products/information-flows/

Information management is good for...

Assumption 1: ...everybody -any production unit, any research, any marketing unit, any authority needs data

Assumption 2: ...people who have no other capacity for deciding

Assumption 3: ...a small group of dominating capitalists to further increase their profits

„The amount of data available today via WWW is only a fraction of what we can expect in the future. We will need completely new methods to deal with this flood of information. The winners will be search machines, searching tools, and those people who see information as the basis of the future development of mankind. Those who develop useful educational and didactic materials, information products and educational methods to help mankind with evolutionary development“

Information management is good for...

...most probably all three target groups, but most of all for

the information industry itself?

Tobias Knoof, founder of the German online magazine

www.digitale-infoprodukte.de and expert on internet traffic

World dominating monopoly?

Depends on the ability of the information industry to deliver correct data and make information more useful:

● Now, Google and others deliver everything and do not adequatly reply to semantic criteria.

● Try to find the facts&figures you need on the statistical pages of the European Union

● Try to find „the right“ data in international university rankings

● Many data connected to academic research are contradictory - Greenhouse effect, „healthy“ nutrition, negative or positive consequences of genetically manipulated seeds

● Compare European and US unemployment statistics

● Remember business figures issued by certain US investment banks in the recent past

● Think about the reality behind figures on the GDP

Security & Privacy?

1) Data security technologies

● 1.1 Disk encryption● 1.2 Hardware-based mechanisms for protecting

data● 1.3 Backups● 1.4 Data masking● 1.5 Data erasure

2) International laws and standards

● 2.1 International laws● 2.2 International standards

Forget it!

What now?

Join ATTAC and start destroying the information age?

Rely on only what we see, hear, smell, touch? (Remember? That was the original definition for information...)

Get back to before 1995? (The year the WWW had its breakthrough)

Give up my career, go to the countryside and start farming?

We can add new values and parameters to information.

Now what if we added these:

We cannot and will not turn back time, but...

So far, we dealt with information with these attributes:

● Quantity

● Quality

● Ethics

● Emotions

And changed

● Quantity to

● Reduction

The more need for information = the more dependence on others = the more support for monopolies

Reduction Leads automatically to value no.2. - Quality:Less information can/should increase its quality

Quantity

Reduction = To rely more on personal experience = opportunities for older generations= To increase the responsibility for decisions! (Risk + chance)

● Reduction might also mean to forget about growth. But this is an idea for a different discussion

Too large a field to discuss today. Just a few keywords:

● Selection & verification

● Experience

● Dialogue

One of my favourite examples for data manipulation:International university rankings

1) A look behind the questionnaire reveals a lot of inadequacy: English speaking respondents, geographic divisions, quotations in (English) scientific journals

2) Why are Harvard, Yale, Princeton always at the top of the list? Money (Harvard $32.7 billion!), self fulfilling prophecies.

Quality

Questions in the foreground:

How do we get information?For what purpose do we use it?Who profits from its processing?

Questions in the background:

Would I be ready to discuss ethics with my boss?How do I choose my job?Would I accept a well paid job in an oil sand exploitation company or with an army supplier?

Ethics & Emotion

The most difficult aspects of information management

If so, this will be a major mistake.

For two reasons:

1) Literacy, and, connected with it, education

2) The limited life cycle of electronic storage media

Part 2: The Book

Why now talk about books? Will they not disappear?

Literacy aspects in a nutshell:

● Books are an essential part of general education and a basis for intelligence: Reading is a fundamental training for the cognition of complex systems, for understanding context, for creativity and for concentration

● The physical book has an emotional character different from the virtual existence of e-book content.

● There is a growing discrepancy between dropping basic educational skills and the growing requirements of a highly digitalized society.

N. b.: We're not talking about non-fiction such as telephone directories, address books, all kinds of data collection etc.

Literacy

Floppy disk: 3-5 years. Though no longer made, many still exist; examples include 8”, 5.25” and 3.5” disks, along with items such as Zip and Jaz disks.

Flash media: 1-10 years. Includes USB flash drives, SD/SDHC cards and solid-state drives; all generally are less reliable than traditional spinning-disk hard drives.

Hard drive: 2-8 years. The health of a spinning disk hard drive often depends on the environment; excessive heat, for example, can lead to quick failure.

CD/DVD/Blu-ray optical disk: 2-10 years. There is large variation in the quality of optical media; note that “burnable” discs typically have a shorter life than “factory pressed” discs).

Magnetic tape: 10-30 years.  Tape is a more expensive storage option for most users–it depends on specialty equipment–but it is the most reliable media available.

The limited life cycle of electronic storage media

http://agogified.com/97

Information management is undoubtedly a position that will be very asked for in the future.

Some of you will be decision makers.

Some of you will work in information management.

Some of you will work in libraries.

Maybe some of my thoughts make you think...

Thank you.

Contact me via www.park.cz

Your Role in all this...