Against the backdrop of the evolution of media and its powerful gathering of news material and data, all of the world’s happenings are trimmed like a lawn by a mower, with fragments of information flying about from place to place through the media as grass flies through the air. These broken pieces of information adhere to our tofu-like brain like spices sprinkled so thickly that they obscure the entire surface. For a moment, this makes us think we’re quite knowledgeable, but information tacked on the surface of the brain doesn’t amount to much when you add it all together.
Kenya Hara, Art Director for MUJI, on information dissemination in Designing Design. [Thanks for book and wine tip Dave. Book review with above quote here.]
It is interesting to relate this sentiment to Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s concept of a low-information diet, reserving your brain for higher order functions than storing what amounts to rubbish by and large (according to him, you’ll learn whatever news is important by speaking with people at parties via verbal gossip). However, from the perspective of the digital information professional, the apparent chaos surrounding information dissemination is not random, much like looking at beehive or a crowded intersection in New York or Shanghai, over time, there is an order, a flow, a rhythm and a harmony. Information isn’t broken, it is imperfect by design. There is a simplicity in the abstraction that captures the nuanced way information goes from atomic to ubiquitous, from valuable to valueless, from sticky to externalized, from profane to mundane. Information has nature, a food chain, a cycle of death and rebirth, beautiful disasters, seismic shifts, and yet has a stillness when observed as a landscape obscuring us from the dynamic details. The goal is to become one with this nature.
(via gbattle) (via evangotlib) (via mikehudack)
