Information Evolution and Revolution

Information is an object whose age is very old. It is as old as the humanity itself. Only smelling a rose’s scent and admiring its red, one has interacted with information. The messages of its good scent and redness are captured from the rose by one’s nose and eyes. Afterward, the messages – the information – are sent to the brain. Without information, one cannot sense her environment, the world, and even herself.

The unfortunate early life of Helen Keller (1880-1968), blind and deaf, almost made her absolutely isolated from information and information processing, isolated from the world and herself. Barely was she trapped to be nobody or even nothing, if her great teacher, Anne Sullivan, herself almost blind too, came to rescue her life. She taught Helen to sense the world by using a primitive sensing faculty – her skin, her physical touch. Having developed her ability to process information, Helen devised and built her own virtual world inside her head and later became a very incredible writer!

Information is exchanged between two people through various media. In addition to human’s ability to communicate in oral spoken form, paper and its primitive forms really should get most credits for information and knowledge accumulation from a generation to the next. Unlike the spoken form, books especially after the development of printing machine can be duplicated easily. This makes information distribution velocity increases sharply, let alone the volume.

Furthermore, after the development of information technology and the internet, we can even realize how great human ability to learn, create new information, store it, and pass it through to the whole world is. Web 2.0, including this blog, is an example of enablers that makes personal publishing possible. Do we now process information in a significantly different way? Or should we change but do not? Or, information already behaves differently? Is information the one who finds us and not the other way around?

Please watch this video I got from YouTube, titled Information R/evolution:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4CV05HyAbM.