Building Blocks or Mud Bricks?

By Arnold, Stephen E

We talk about an ocean of information. The more poetical describe a tsunami of data. The marketers – ever clever explain that their systems will keep you “from drowning in data.” Language fails us when we speak about information. When that information is digital – zeros and ones – we are, linguistically speaking, up a creek. In the late 1980s, I noticed that Japanese government publications in English were using the words informate, informationize, and informationist. When I saw those terms, I realized the inadequacy of our ability to describe what’s happening as traditional media and communication forms “go digital.”

But technology has, like the Roman god Janus, two faces. One face sees technology as benign. Each innovation makes the world a better place. One champion of digital innovation is the highly regarded wizard, Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab. His work and tireless fund-raising reinforce the American trait of ingenuity as the foundation of the American view of the world. In Being Digital (Knopf, 1995), he writes in a way that cautions against putting too much faith in technology. But the caveat is neutralized with his energetic effort to make low-cost personal computers available to impoverished children via his One Laptop Per Child association (OLPC) [http://laptop.org].

Janus’ other high-tech face is exemplified in the concerns of Jacque Ellul, a philosopher and controversial scholar who equated anarchy and Christianity. To sum up Professor Ellul’s analysis, La Technique: L’enjen du siecle (Economica, 1964), technology’s future impacts are often unanticipated. Our modern world solves unanticipated problems via technology. Not surprisingly, this human trait has created some nasty problems in the modern world. Professor Ellul died in 1994, and we can only speculate what his view would have been of multimedia, Twitter, and the growing digital divide that exists in most countries today.

So where does that leave us in 2008? Are we swamped with digital information? Have traditional media “gone digital,” creating opportunities and challenges for publishers and authors? Have we even enough terminology to deal with the “flood” of information? Do we have our hands firmly in the 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock positions on the NASCAR of innovation? Do we know the impact of iPhone on users yet? Or even RIM’s BlackBerry?

Defining the Problem

A discussion of information of any type begs for definitions. One of the interesting characteristics of the discourse about our digital environment is the lack of agreement on what constitutes information. Digital information is even more slippery. What, for example, distinguishes information from data? What do we call the outputs of a text mining system that generates data from unstructured text? Do we use the charming Japanese coinages from the late 1990s, namely, informate (verb): to imbue information into an object previously lacking “information”; informationize (verb) : to use a manufacturing process to create information; or softwares (noun) as a plural form to describe the digital artifacts that can contain information? If we talk about information for more than 10 or 15 minutes, someone will start using such terms as epistemology (a subspecies of philosophy that attempts to probe the origin, nature, methods, systems, and limits of human knowledge) or heuristics (a method of solving a problem such as determining a definition of knowledge). Do you want to define knowledge? I steer clear of this term because we are likely to be sucked into the black hole of phenomenological existentialism. No wonder we don’t have a way to explain the effects of information in the form of ones and zeros. We point to what one can do with digital information. Teens, for example, rip CDs and share their music.

What should we do? We are an information society but we don’t know what that means. We see changes caused, we assume, by being digital. For guidance we have the ambivalent god Janus who lets us manipulate our definitions to meet the instrumentality at hand. In short, we are being digitized and informationized without a compass, a North Star, or knowledge to guide us.

We can look at several aspects of the peculiar blend of blood, sweat, and tears required to create a motion picture, a hip hop song, or a book. But these creative acts increasingly produce insubstantial, fluid, and often unpredictable zeros and ones.

Unlike a fungible book or silver halide 16mm film, digital outputs are insubstantial and difficult to describe. Publishers talk about “slicing and dicing” information. The idea is that indexed data can be combined in new ways without the need for much, if any, human intervention. (Authors, do you feel threatened yet?) George Gilder, a successful author and financial advisor, shanghaied the word convergence to describe what happens when different devices collapse into a multifunctional gizmo. The multifunctional device in my pocket can make telephone calls, send and receive email, and take photographs. With some button punching, I can view a video on its Lilliputian screen, play games, and perform the Vulcan mind meld with other users of this contrivance.

I don’t want to go “metaphysical,” an analyst’s version of “going postal,” but it’s important to keep in mind that digital information is tough to describe. We use old words and infuse them with new meanings. We don’t understand the implications of digital technology, but we take advantage ofthat technology without really understanding its transformative nature.

Three interesting challenges confront us. First, we have to talk about the shift from tangible artifacts of information (books, 35mm color slides, phonograph records, etc.) to the fluid zeros and ones parked in storage devices and zinging around networks without traditional gatekeepers. An engineer or clever teen can slice and dice, mash up, repurpose, and invent using those zeros and ones. So somehow those flows of digital information appear to erode intellectual and artistic tradition. Mention this to a teen – maybe your own son or daughter – and the teen won’t know what you are talking about. Like most parents, you shake your head and drop the subject.

Second, we have to discuss technologies that we don’t know much about and have almost no clue as to their ultimate trajectory and impact. And, third, we have to talk about a world in which a single device contains dozens, maybe hundreds, of functions.

One more challenge and the most immediately ominous, business models that have worked since Gutenberg concluded that he could charge for an unreadable print job are under pressure. Newspapers appear to need life support. The hapless music industry faces both customer and artist revolts. The educational system is pumping support into iTunes’ access to lectures. For some subjects such as ancient Greek history, why won’t smaller schools fire their history professors and let iTunes pick up the slack? The apparent rationality of such decisions accentuates the business model revolution now taking place.

This makes me nervous. I can’t figure out most of the features in my notebook computer. I can’t even see some of the controls on my mobile phone. I have neither the interest nor the eyesight to watch YouTube.com videos on any device regardless of its size. Keep these constraints in mind as you follow my argument about our digital plight.

A Quick Look Back

In 1999 and 2000, I wrote two articles for Searcher magazine about convergence: “The TV-Web Net Appliance: All in the Family Room?” (vol. 7, no. 9, October 1999, pp. 34+) and “Millennial Angst and Searchers” (vol. 8, no. 1, January 2000, pp. 90+). The titles are clever but don’t reveal that both essays are about convergence technologies. I try to avoid the word convergence. When information shifts from ink on paper or analog form to zeros and ones in digital form, there’s no convergence. Data are data, or, for the less grammatically correct, data is data. The notion of convergence, therefore, is like a Swiss Army knife. One device, such as a television flat screen, serves multiple functions. When I hear convergence, I think of the pitchman’s, “It slices. It dices. It chops. It juliennes potatoes the way you like them.”

My past two essays identified the forces that make mobile phones, TVs, notebook computers, and other gizmos behave like digital gerbils. Put a couple of them together and they breed. Variants proliferate. Let’s face it: Digital information, cheap electronics, and developed societies’ love of gadgets has put the convergence issue to rest. We’re converged.

We’re Converged. Now What?

This is the important question. In an essay that will appear in Italian in a yearbook available from Associatizionni Civita in Rome, I spell out some bitter pills to choke down for those in libraries, museums, and public service. Let’s look at the three challenges professionals in these institutions face in our converged world.

First, websites will not solve revenue, attendance, or visibility problems for 99% of the institutions. The reality is that most websites, web services, and web applications do not guarantee success. Inexperience or bad decisions about what to “web-ify” can drag an organization down, and, in terms of revenue, plunge the operation into the red. Therefore, significant effort is required to create a browser experience that attracts users and continues to build usage. The costs of development, enhancements, and sales are often far greater than expected. In terms of search and content processing, customers learn (often the hard way) that there is neither money nor appetite for making the systern perform as advertised. I see no change in this paradoxical situation. The more you want to do with content, the farther behind you fall. Second, information on its own won’t ensure success either. A museum or a library has much high-value information. Putting that data online won’t accomplish much. There are upwards of 30 billion webpages. The odds of an art galley generating traffic “because it’s there” is misguided. Users are now savvy when it comes to access, interface, ease of use, and clarity. I learned yesterday about a new search system that uses the Apple iPhone “flipping page” metaphor to display search results. In the view of the venture firm pumping millions into this startup, a list of relevant results warrants the expense; that is, interface, not relevance, is as important as clever algorithms. I never thought I would say this, but I agree. A flawed user experience can doom a superior search and content processing system within 30 seconds of a user’s accessing the service.

One issue arises from the foregoing. I call this the “website imperative.” Most organizations, small- and mid-sized businesses, and young people need a webpage. I’m using the phrase webpage in a broad sense. A “presence” in MySpace, Facebook, or Twitter falls under my rather large umbrella definition. But there’s a problem with everyone having a webpage. Some websites will start out equal with others, but, over time, a few websites will become more equal than others. We now have a situation in which most websites get little or no traffic and, therefore, only provide psychic value to their creators. The money spent shifting to the web may pay no dividends for the website creator. In a desperate search for visitors to the website, Google and Yahoo! stand ready to deliver clicks for money.

Third, everyone is an expert in online, metadata, and the web – or at least the folks I meet all think they are wizards. Remember, your assumptions have to be verified with facts. A catch phrase from someone in President Reagan’s administration echoes in my mind: “Trust but verify.” One of the twists in the information world is that the snazzier the demonstration, the greater the gullibility factor. (A “gullibility factor” is a person’s willingness to accept the demo as reality.) Assumptions about what search and content processing can do contribute to most information retrieval project failures. We stop at “trust” and leapfrog over “verify.”

Technologies From the Past

There’s a “gee whiz” breathlessness in some popular weblogs. It surfaces in the “tech-worship” columns in the Economist, Financial Times, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. What passes for technology is usually a product review or description of some zippy new product or service. Some writeups probe the guts of a technology topic, but most are the journalistic equivalent of Entertainment Tonight.

The products and services we use today embody technologies considered, in some cases, as ancient when measured in internet time. For example, XML, the bastard child of SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), is the descendant of IBM’s GML (Generalized Markup Language). GML is almost 50 years old. (I am willing to wager you don’t know who created GML. Give up? Charles Goldfarb, Edward Mosher, and Raymond Lorie. Do you see the nerd humor in GML? Look closely at these surnames. GML – get it?)

Let’s create a Homer-style list of technologies and then turn our attention to several assumptions. Here’s my short list of “new” technologies:

* Ajax

* Cloud applications

* Flash

* Flickr

* Hadoop

* Java

* Perl

* Personalization

* Python

* RSS (really simple syndication)

* SMS (short message system)

* SaaS (software as a service)

* Silverlight

* Software agents

* Tags

* Taxonomies

* Weblogs (blogs)

* Web services

* Wikis

* XML (extensible markup language)

Keep in mind that more than half of these technologies were identified in those two essays I wrote back in 1999. Our present is rooted in the last 96 months.

The “family room.” This is a digital space, not a place with chairs, a sofa, and a TV Today we talk about social networks. A social network is a consequence of persistent connections, communication applications, and ubiquitous mobile devices. How will mobile devices alter the fabric of a South African township where electricity is provided by an automobile battery and nighttime light by oil lamps? The digital divide exists and, in some places, continues to widen. The societal and political effects of this interesting situation are difficult to predict. My hunch is that many of the effects will be destabilizing, a frequent result of our informationized environment.

Content. You don’t need me to tell you that there is a great deal of content available on the internet. Google indexes about 30 billion webpages, but no one is exactly sure how many webpages are “out there.” Dynamic sites – the fastest-growing type of website – are tough to convert to webpages. No webpage exists until you perform an action. Hockey stick charts show that more information is created each year than in the previous years of recorded history. You may not realize that sites are dynamic. Let me suggest that you launch your browser and navigate to http://only2clicks.com/ home.php. Upload your bookmarks. When you next visit the site, the page showing thumbnail images of your bookmarks will appear. If you don’t visit Only2Clicks, the webpage doesn’t “exist.” You see your page only when you navigate to the site and Only2Clicks “reads” the cookie (small text file) on your PC or your login information. Dynamic sites account for the majority of new websites today. One consequence of dynamic sites such as Only2Clicks.com, Orbitz.com, and MyYahoo! is that traditional web indexing scripts (robots) can’t easily index them. The web index upon which you rely may be blind to a significant amount of information of great value to many users. A dynamic site ups the ante for search and retrieval services. Truth be told, even the mighty Google does only an average job with dynamic websites, but most users are unaware of Google’s feet of clay.

Search. You can’t do work or have much fun unless you can find information. Search is no longer an option; it’s a must-have application. Despite Google’s facility with web search, other types of search are remarkably bad. Think video, audio, dynamic content, email attachments, anything on your employer’s own servers, and your own archived data. If you think search for these types of information is good, you probably like dining on water and gruel too.

Assisted interfaces. Confess. You don’t like to craft complex Boolean queries. You, like most people, want the computer to give you what you need without your having to do anything. The naked search box is no longer sufficient. Interfaces evidence different artistic designs, but the modality of interaction has stayed the same for a decade or more. The Apple iPhone is an important new direction, but touch and talk are not yet widespread. An iPhone interface eliminates much of the thumb typing required by traditional mobile phones. The screen is touch-sensitive. A finger swipe causes images to change or graphic pages to turn. The keyboard is no longer a pint-sized stub of rubber; it’s a graphic display. The implications of these advances in smart software within a compact, powerful device are difficult to identify. Some call the Apple iPhone the “Jesus phone.” It’s that revolutionary. Software assists the user instead of the user taking software by the hand and leading it to the desired goal.

Smaller, faster, cheaper devices. No argument from me here. Who wants to go back to the good old days of the “luggable” Kaypro II computer or a Texas Instruments Silent 700? I’m 64, getting fat, finding certain frequencies elusive, and squinting at 12-point type in a printed book. I can’t watch video on an iPhone or Nokia device. I’m not the market. The young and the hip are. These iPhone users can and do watch video – indeed conduct most of their online life – on tiny screens.

Instant-on devices. Progress is evident in this sector. The new Asus eee 700 is an important step. Low power and quick start. But for desktop and notebook computers, if you turn them off, you still have to wait when you start them up.

Fast chips. Yes, these are now becoming a reality. Intel is pushing forward with plans to put 80 or more processors on one chunk of silicon. With that kind of processing power, piggy software can be used to make devices more intelligent. Unfortunately battery technology is mostly unchanged since 1999. Oh, except for one development: Lower-quality standards translate to battery fires. Are we having fun yet?

Linux. When you turn on your flat panel Ty you are running Linux. Linux may not displace Windows on the PC, but it is gaining momentum in certain types of devices, including mobile phones. The Google Android platform is Linux-centric.

TVs. Wheezer’s drummer uses a Mac notebook with a Vizio 42-inch 1080 flat panel. The difference between a smart TV and a computer monitor is narrowing. The difference does not lie in the display technology, but in the electronics in the display panel. Display technology continues to advance, creating new ways to use, view, and immerse us in digital constructs. There will be dumb TV and smart TV, but this distinction is imposed on the display by the user. Advertisers will have to adapt to this “viewer in control” mode. Companies that can offer ad services for different types of video consumers may have a bright future denied to agencies with a more traditional line-up of advertising services and expertise. Collaboration. This is an extension of email without the spam (yet). With travel costs soaring, collaboration will increase. On my site (ArnoldIT.com), I’m getting more traffic from “social” sites such as StumbleUpon.com and del.icio.us.com than from Microsoft or Yahoo!. Google continues to dominate, but it is clear that the dominance of the web search engines is eroding. No surprise here. As connections become pervasive, the internet” has become another communication medium. In a year or so, social systems will rework today’s notion of search and, with it, work. Work is impossible unless one can “find” what one needs to make a decision or cause an action.

Netcasts. I chose the wrong term 9 years ago. These are now called podcasts. They come in audio and video forms. Most are ignored, but their prevalence underscores the accuracy of Steve Jobs’s observation, “People don’t read books anymore.”

Wrapper software. In 1999,1 used the terms Java, CORBA, Perl. Today, these programming tools help make web services possible. Web services have now given rise to SaaS (software as a service). Financial pressure and what Google’s Dave Girouard calls the “crisis in IT” are making hosted services more appealing. Running applications over the network is no longer called ASP or application service provider. We now talk about cloud-based services or managed services, such as Amazon Web Services, to name only one.

Plug-and-play ecommerce. An old idea that is now realized. The best example is Amazon’s suite of ecommerce services. These range from becoming an Amazon store to using Amazon to handle your shipping, billing, and data storage [http:// astore.amazon.com].

Smart software. “Artificial intelligence” never lived up to its premature hype. Bandwidth, beefy CPUs, and cheap memory make it possible – finally-to use computational intelligence. Google, based on my research for my 2007 monograph Google Version 2.0, is one of the leaders in this technical field, but, true to form, Google won’t talk about these breakthroughs.

Objects and flexible outputs. The technologies identified above make “slicing and dicing” information trivial. We now call this functionality a mashup, i.e., combining different types of information to create more useful, sometimes new information “outputs.” If we strip away the jargon, anyone can become a publisher. Bad news for “real” publishers, but traditional publishers, including database producers, have had a decade to move out of the way of the speeding bytes.

So, What’s New?

Not long ago, I sat down and made a list of the companies engaged in content processing. A handful of these organizations sell search and retrieval systems. Most of them offer something beyond search. I don’t expect you to be able to read this list of vendors, but you will get the idea quickly despite the graphic’s illegibility.

All these companies are engaged in rich content processing, text mining, and other activities that break the shackles of keyword search. It’s no longer an unspoken secret that traditional search doesn’t work particularly well. Google uses “voting algorithms” to goose its relevancy. Hundreds of vendors have other content processing techniques to help a user locate a relevant digital document.

What’s new from most of the companies on this list? New ones appear each week, sometimes an “old” company will reinvent itself. InQuira – formed from three weaker search companies is now thriving as a customer self-service system. The aging Inxight technology is now the engine inside the PR-sawy Powerset. Behemoths such as Microsoft are buying promising search vendors such as Fast Search & Transfer SA in order to get their information technology vehicles in the race, instead of the repair shop.

There are hundreds of vendors claiming that their systems can help us all deal with three problems:

1. Increasing volumes of digital information

2. Technologies that change work procedures

3. Impacts and long-term effects we cannot predict.

The situation we face is similar to that of a person caught in swamp mud. There is no way to get out easily, quickly, and cleanly. For some poor souls, the problem is sufficiently large that escape is impossible.

We have left a world in which knowledge was encased in artifacts such as bound volumes. We no longer have the rigidities of the trivium, not the web trivia site. (The scholastic trivium in medieval education referred to the lower division of the seven liberal arts, comprising grammar, rhetoric, and logic.) Learning today is lifelong and can take place in Starbuck’s, not a lecture hall without heat or air conditioning.

In this world, we have not agreed on terms upon which to hang our understanding and our arguments. We don’t have a sense of past, present, or future. We have the “now” of information grazing. According to one pundit, humans have a craving for information stimulation. Teens will quickly agree with this assertion. Old dogs like me think multitasking is impossible for a human of my age and intellectual orientation. I still do one thing at a time.

A Proposal

The notion of convergence annoys me. The reality is that we need to quit dancing around the problems of digital information and tackle them in a systematic way. Web 2.0 conferences which allow a “speaker” to answer soft, fluffy questions tossed by a journalist won’t provide much useful information. So here’s what I propose.

First, information-centric associations such the Special Libraries Association (SLA), the ACM, and maybe some eggheads from the American Philosophical Society should hold a forum to discuss the problems of talking about digital information. One outcome of the forum or meeting (physical or digital) could be a glossary of terms with definitions. I’m not in the grip of any hallucination about everyone sticking to the words and their meanings defined by a committee, but the effort would be a beginning.

Second, conferences and learned publications should include articles and discussions about the “meaning” of electronic information, its impacts (past, present, and future), and research about the “digital revolution” that you and I are now living in.

Third, in each vendor presentation, we make a pact to ask tough questions along the lines of “What do you mean by that statement?” and “How do you define taxonomy?” If each of us demands more from vendors, we have a fighting chance of getting some facts upon which to base a decision. All too frequently, procurement teams select an informationizing system because the salesperson was nice, because the vendor was already providing another system, or the price was great. A little more intellectual rigor could exert considerable force.

Wrap Up

The two articles I wrote almost a decade ago could run again today with only a few changes. The examples I mentioned would have to be changed. Digital information is a fierce animal indeed. It consumes vendors like a ravenous lioness eating a gazelle. In some ways, the technologies mentioned in those articles and listed in Homeric fashion elsewhere in this essay seem stable. That’s an illusion. The names may seem familiar but technology works like a mutating virus. In a few time slices, we have a very different beastie to understand.

In other ways, the world is quite different. The ebbs and flows of finance, political agendas, and human success make today’s world very different. Unless we come to grips with ways to talk about what’s happening and how digital change takes place, we’re flying blind.

I’m not comfortable in that setting. Are you?

Google has introduced colorful, high-legibility graphics for its non-U.S. splash page. With each enhancement, Google moves farther from its clean, uncluttered interface.

The Amazon ecommerce service allows anyone to become a merchant. Amazon has become a leader in cloud-based services and application delivery. In a search for revenue, the company is moving outside its core competencies.

Do a Better Job

What can you do now to use these examples to craft “smarter deals” and to take steps to acquire systems that deliver “real” value? Here are some suggestions:

1. Invest the time to define what you want to accomplish. This obvious first step is often viewed as unnecessary. A snort of dismissal launches information projects into the abyss. Vendors take advantage of ignorance and uncertainty. Their job is to sell, not run an SAT preparation class.

2. Define a budget, figure out how to keep track of costs, and stay within that budget. If you take your eye off the money, you will end up in your own mini-credit crisis. On the personal front, you will spend more than you intended. On the work front, you will look like a clueless liability to the company’s chief financial officer. No one gets in trouble for spending money specifically allocated to a project.

3. Manage yourself, the vendor, and the project. I encounter many individuals who “hide” within a bureaucracy. If no one takes ownership, the advanced features of a search system or even your own home LCD television will go unused. A failure to manage is mismanagement. You can rationalize your behavior to your friends, but you can’t make mismanagement invisible. It sits like the Rock of Gibraltar in plain sight for anyone to see.

4. Beware Star Trek technologies. In the 1970s, I remember watching an episode of Gene Roddenberry’s original classic sci-fi series. Last week, a manic Harvard grad wanted reassurance about voice parsing for mobile phone queries. I told our future million- dollar man, “Talking to your phone works as long as you are not in an airport, driving, at home, in an office, or walking in the wind.” He seemed hurt. Stick with technology that works reasonably well.

5. Talk to your colleagues and peers about what works and what doesn’t, what they need to help them with their personal or professional life, and, when they talk, listen. In 2007, my team did a job for a very large, prestigious engineering organization. Listening was a skill that this outfit refused to learn. Not surprisingly, most of the systems were irritants to users. Once you listen, then you can act in a purposeful way. If you choose not to listen, you will be acting with the modern equivalent of Julius Caesar. And we all know what happened to him – the Ides of March, civil war, and pestilence. Actually, it could have been worse for a person who didn’t need to listen. The lovable luggable weighed in at the 25 pound range. Despite its clunkiness, it represented a great leap forward over dumb Texas Instrument Silent 700s and the desk anchor form factor of desktop personal computers.

The author’s list of all companies engaged in content processing.

by Stephen E. Arnold * ArnoldIT.com

Copyright Information Today, Inc. Jul/Aug 2008

(c) 2008 Searcher. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.