Information flow

How do you know what you need to know?

The turn of the 21st century saw an enormous transformation in how information is handled.  That’s hardly a new observation, but it bears examining.  By the mid-twentieth century one could get a message from somewhere to somewhere else almost immediately.  However, the message had to be (by later standards) simple, so the sender had to choose what was most important out of all the possibilities and confine himself/herself to that.  It was, in later terminology, a “push” system.

In many cases, the choice was not difficult: “Enemy carriers, 30-21N, 179-55E, course 120, speed 20” takes only a moment to say (or tap out in Morse code); “The following equation relates momentum to wavelength for a particle” takes up little space in a book.  But to a large extent the succinctness was imposed by the system, and much more information would have been welcome.  No doubt Admiral Spruance would have loved to have details of the aircraft and pilot readiness of each Japanese carrier.  And our astronomer has been frustrated more than once when facing a mathematical development that his textbook hasn’t quite made clear.

With the great digital communication revolution all that changed.  Now you, as the user, have an enormous choice of information to get hold of.  What you get is up to you; it’s a “pull” system.  Our navigator was on a Navy staff when the change was taking hold.  It was touted as a great advantage, when anyone could directly grab whatever they deemed necessary or useful.  Well, he is conservative and contrary by nature, so he asked the question: how do you know what you need?  Suppose the Admiral wanted this ship to know something, but the ship didn’t pull it in?  No doubt someone on the staff eventually worked up good answers, or at least functional ones, but the question remains for the rest of us.

This is not quite the same as: how do you filter the waterfall of information available on the internet to find what you want?  In that case, you are rejecting data that do not match your needs, because it’s irrelevant, inaccurate, a lie, or for some other reason.  Nor is it quite the same as the situation our astronomer found himself in, when he knew the questions to ask but didn’t know what the answers were called.  Here, we’re trying to work out what the questions are.

We haven’t come up with any general method.  Perhaps there isn’t one.  We might start with some trusted authority, and go back to something like the old system (though calling him or her our “pusher” is probably a bad idea).  We do know that following the most-asked-questions on the internet is exactly the wrong way to go.