Information Sustainability
When you think of information, your mind might snap to an abstract idea of the internet with all its vast connections and the interwoven content contained within its veins. Perhaps, you may think of the facts and skills taught in a class or conveyed in a book. Perhaps your perception of information is even more metaphysical—recognizing that information is imbued in the very nature of our world, perpetuated by a statistical exception in the second law of thermodynamics and by extension through our human minds.
Throughout my life I have thought about information in all these ways, but one thing I never considered was if information was worth preserving in a holistic and sustainable way. To be sure, carrying forward the important learnings of our collective civilization has always been a mandate of mankind and a need that was very clear to me even at a young age. Still, what is the nature of this preservation? What information is included and why? Even more critically, how does it remain valuable and when is it worth letting go?
These questions were—in different ways—weighing on my mind over the course of my studies here at California College of the Arts. As an Interaction Design student, the nature of information and it’s value to society and the individual is part of the medium of designing in this digital age. What I did not understand was that underlying this thinking was a question of what information we value and how we determine that value. That translates to justifying such information’s existence.
In James Gleick’s book The Information: A history, A Theory, A Flood, he describes some types of information as memetic. As these memes perpetuate through our society and our lives they take on a life of their own. They grow and evolve in order to survive our value judgement. As time marches forward, we change the nature of these memes to fit our intellectual and emotional needs. These ideas live on through our social zeitgeist—or rather our social normative culture. This can take the form of morals in epic poems or teachings in religious texts. Sometimes they live as seemingly benign sayings like “bro’s before ho’s” but grow to symbolize a misogynistic prioritization of the sexes, for example.
This critical step is how my project and exploration began. I wanted to understand the space where an idea was born; how information was incepted and released into the world and how it later grows into either something useful or something destructive.
I am currently in a class here at California College of the Arts called Interaction Design 5: Sustainability. In this class my teachers Suelyn Yu and David Merkowski describe sustainability as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
I would argue that the way we generate and maintain our information is not sustainable.
As it stands now, when information is created it is imbued with meaning and a purpose. Problems arise as people are presented with new ideas and information they do not understand. Even more dangerous is if they are only presented with partial information, part of an argument, or only one way of viewing the world. As our capacity to generate information has grown exponentially so has our ability to become lost. Even if now we are meeting our current needs of referencing information. I would argue we are barely able to meet our current needs for informative discourse. There is no way future generations will be able to utilize the systems we have in place now to their advantage unless they can actively engage with new ideas in a prodcutive way.
Valuable ideas and discourse can become lost or ignored. This behavior allows for individuals to perpetuate that which undermines their own ability to think critically. It is in this space that I have found a project. I aim to build a tool for the individual to navigate this sea of disconnected and elaborate miasma that so easily confounds us and misleads us.
I want to help a new generation of people participate and contribute to humanity’s collective knowledge easily and in a way that is enriching instead of overwhelming.
As information grows, so too must the way we organize and exchange it. If the aggregation of all of this content in the world is to truly add value to our lives, then it must have a meaningful way to have discourse and choose what information really is valuable, and how to pass it forward.
On this blog is my process of discovery and the response I have crafted. The scope of this project is to develop a process to address this problem, execute a solution, and either infiltrate a company that I see has leverage to make change or go public with my designs and ideas.
