By Sam Stewart Mutabazi
People everywhere generate tones of information every day. A lot of it is on the internet and in public domain. We envisage a time in future when the internet will have too much information that it will be difficult to sieve through let alone get the right information. There is a common saying that “quality goods are elf-selling” sometimes the quality product is hidden far away that it becomes too costly to retrieve that product. Quality information may be hidden amidst a heap of information. Finding it could be like searching for a needle in a haystack.
If the world has been able to gather this much information in so short a time, what will happen in the next one hundred years. With population increase and better means of information flow, time is coming when most people will not be able to consume all the information. Some good information could be lost in a sea of data. Recent statistics indicate that the internet is loaded with 2.5 quintillion bytes of information every single day. The volume of data is just overwhelming. The number keeps growing. Millions of people release thousands of books, music, literature, videos, art and photographs every day.
Some writers have equated the current information with a scenario of eating too much food which leads to obesity and when the food is not of good quality it leads to intoxication. Along the same lines, two words have been coined to infer to a situation where there is too much information leading to “Infobesity” and later resulting in “infoxification”
In a free world of today, people post information on the internet as they please. The internet is uncensored. Some of the information is useful while a lot of it is misleading. Whereas the ICT tools are getting more modern, the human brain for whom this information is intended hasn’t changed much/ shall we reach a time when there shall be data aggregation in such a way that the truth can be separated from hearsay? Whose mandate shall it be to clean all word data? Some people with hidden intensions argue that “all data is useful”. But one must add that not all data is useful at the same time.
Over democratization of information and data doesn’t necessarily mean or translate into a free and knowledgeable world. It may to the contrary mean a confuse world. Too much of anything is always bad. Abundant data on the internet is good only to those who know how to use it. It benefits those who control this resource. The consumers of information shall remain subservient and subordinate to those who are promoting mass information exchange through the internet. After all, the people who control the internet know how to manipulate it to get the best out of it.
The consumer of information from the internet may not get the real knowledge. What appears to be good knowledge is always up for sale on the internet. Good knowledge and data is always for sale. Any knowledge that is freely accessible on the net is not necessarily useful and would have been classified as such by those who control the internet systems. Any worthwhile knowledge will always be up for sale.
So the biggest question is this: what was the agenda of people who introduced the internet? On the face of it they may appear like they were genuine people whose interest it was to promote free speech and access to information. However, when one is keen enough, they should be able be realize too much information will be confusing than clarifying. More capturing than liberating. More verbose than specific. Real knowledge is given by God. Any other knowledge is secondary. We shall get beck to this subject in future, God willing. God bless you!