RTWard.com

I was sitting at home during my lunch break today, chomping on some downright decent curry, frantically clicking refresh on my browser window which just happened to contain the Engadget liveblog of the latest apple event.  Something struck me about how the nature of how we interact with computers has changed over the years.  Over the past decade or so, the big problem in computing has made a fundamental shift from proucing information, to organizing it.

Let me elaborate a bit...

In the early days of computing, everything was about producing little pieces of information.  Be it the financial summary for some company, a piece of writing, or any arbitrary file.  The development of computer resources was completely aimed at making this production easier.  It gave us things like the GUI, programs like Photoshop and Word, and interface devices like the mouse and touchscreen.  In those days, everything seemed to be focused in an inward manner towards the hard drive of the computer.

Now though, the tables have turned.  Every new application we here about, from social networking, to the new iPhone features are squarely aimed the the organization of data.  The production has almost become the afterthought, a task best left to machines.  The content producers we have left, are increasingly not producers at all, but content organizers.  No trend illustrates this more then blogging, when you read most blog posts, they will wax poetic for a few lines about some topic or another, and then what do we find? A link to someone else who talked for a few more lines, another link, and so on until eventually you get to someone who actually created something.

I think my fear is not that humanity will eventually stop producing things, or that we will become a people lost in our own data excesses, but I fear a data bubble.  Like the derivitives traders who bought and sold insurance on insurance, and heged against hedge, I wonder how much value we can build on this small amount of content, and at what point the rug is coming out from underneath us. 

What I think we may be heading for is a collapse of the information markets.  What I mean, is that while there will still be a marginal amount of information created, I think at some point people will lose faith in the endless supply of secondary sources, and the market for them will dry up.  The unfortunate side effect will be that some actual producers get taken down in the process, but all in all I see it as a nescessary growing pain.

My hope is that we can get back to a world where the power of computing is again brought to bear not on the organization of an echo chamber, but on the creation of real value and knowlage.