Losing control

The word knowledge is often misunderstood. Knowledge isn’t a synonym for information. Knowledge is wisdom derived from information. Information, therefore, needs to go through a fine sieve to before it can be sorted and then assimilated in the context of the necessary detail needed for a particular job.

A lot of information, therefore, isn’t like a lot of money. I love a lot of money; more the merrier. I never lose sight of them and I always know how every penny will be spent (it always does get spent). Information, on the other hand, leaves kilos of hard copy remainders and occupies gigabytes of hard disc space. The insecurities within us (it is, with me) often prevent us from throwing it all away (unless it is a book, which then becomes a holy cow, not to be tampered with) or deleting it en masse. What if I lose this? And what if tomorrow I need it again?

The argument is simple. If you haven’t needed a piece of information (unless it is important personal and family, or company data such as municipal records) in a couple of years, you can be sure that you won’t be needing it again. There are a few reasons for this. First, such data will become dated in this fast-paced world. Second, and more important, you will not even be remembering that you actually had such data in your grasp. And third, you will gag on your past records, and refuse to update to paradigm shifts in application.

First rule of thumb: never get sentimental with data. You will suffer from data overload, or information overload. There was a time when, to be able to access the vast pool of information in National Geographic magazines, I used to keep an index of subjects, marking them to different magazine dates and page numbers. It worked wonders for a time, before the Internet became commonplace, and before search engines became so smart that my indexing methods looked like a toddler’s attempt at indexing his favourite toys.

What was my option? Should I have mourned the death of my indexing method and cursed Google? Or should I have just been happy that I did what I could when I could, patted myself on the back, and turn full time to Google? Google it was.

So what then? And why am I writing this anyway? Google became too efficient, that’s what happened. For every search on ‘world drinking water supply’, for example, I was getting 10,900,000 results in 0.23 seconds flat! Now starts the big task of sifting through them, peeking into my screen, trying to understand the tags before I clicked, and so on. By the 18^th page, I somewhat forgot what I was looking for and digressed into some other interesting subject. This is a process, you see.

So, would I go back to my leisurely days of indexing NG mags? Probably not. I will still be wallowing in my oversupplied sorrows, trying to make the best of a bad situation. So am I losing control over my desires, my needs, my inner cravings? The best way to find out about that, I guessed, was to Google ‘losing control of self’. 2,220,000 results in 0.17 seconds flat!

What am I going to do with myself?