Читать книгу Figure It Out - Stephen P. Anderson - Страница 10

Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of “facts” they feel stuffed, but absolutely “brilliant” with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving.

—RAY BRADBURY, FAHRENHEIT 451

We all want to understand. None of us wants the information in our lives to leave us confused or ignorant or frustrated, though it often does. What we want is for information to inform, for that is the fundamental job of inform_ation—a job that includes making us smarter, educated, and more knowing, not to mention entertained. Life is unimaginable without information, and although we have gobs of it, the goal is not having it, but using it to some end. We want information to help us solve problems, make decisions, create insights, reveal truths, and set us on a better path. Information should add to our lives, not subtract, though when we lack understanding that is just what it does.

When we consider the arc of civilization, humanity has been relentless in developing more powerful information technologies—from clay tablets to sticky notes and smartphones—along with more effective ways to share this information, organize it, and search for it. This relentlessness has only intensified as we have built a global digital infrastructure. This effort has rendered information both abundant and cheap, and, as a result, it has been injected into the whole fabric of life. We have seemingly infinite information at our fingertips, often literally, no matter where we are or what we are doing. You will even find Wi-Fi at Mount Everest, and the first climber to tweet from the summit did so in 2011. We use information for grand challenges, such as climate change or curing cancer, or small ones, such as staying in touch with friends or digging up obscure baseball stats. But in every facet of life, whether our need is ambitious or trivial, information fails us unless we also understand it.

Even as authors of a book on understanding, we are not immune to the challenges posed by so much information. We, too, often find ourselves with piles of information and a paucity of understanding. At the same time, we have, both of us, built careers by making information more understandable. We have created websites, mobile apps, concept models, data visualizations, navigation systems, organization schemes, university courses, strategy sessions, and endless presentations. We have learned, often the hard way, that simply giving people information, or making it easier to find, is just a halfway measure. Providing information is merely the start. The whole job includes figuring out how to fit the pieces into a cohesive, useful, understandable whole in much the same way that a recipe and the freshest of ingredients does not make a meal. Understanding, like dinner, doesn’t happen by magic, and in this book we aim to provide a full-spectrum picture of how we, as human beings, go about making sense of the information in our lives.