taylor@hplabsc.UUCP (Dave Taylor) (10/28/86)
Kathy Vincent introduces an interesting point to the forum that I'd like to expand upon. She says; > I think, too, that the software and the BBS are only as good as the person > using it and setting up the BBS....Many of the BBS's are run by kids, kids > who don't have a good sense of order and of how much structure can help > people get around in a BBS. It seems like we're talking about a specific example of the value of people as information Filters and Organizers. The current generation of computer information uses the computer as the filter and organizer, for the most part (witness any bulletin board or conferencing system). There is some human interaction in as much as people occasionally will use peer pressure to stop a line of discussion, or a moderator may refuse an article (as I have done once or twice in this digest). For the most part though, the order and organization is imposed by the author at the time the information is submitted. This has many adverse effects, not the least of which are those that Kathy brings up - information being hard to find and hard to understand. Other problems are since the discussion lacks a rational organization it tends to wander and sometimes never seems to answer the initial questions or points addressed initially. (This isn't always a bad thing - for those systems that parallel social interaction this is good - next time you're talking to a group of people at a party keep track of the topics you reach...) On some networks, notably USENET, the problem is sufficiently great, and sufficiently amplified by the volume of postings, that a large number of people that could and should contribute to the discussions don't because they don't have the time or interest to weed through the postings. This is also greatly worsened by the distributed nature of the USENET - the propogation delay is enough to cause multiple, often different, answers to the same question and discussions that get 'out of sync'. The solutions that have evolved so far are quite illuminating - the most typical being a network of friends who mail each other 'interesting' postings from areas and groups they suspect the other doesn't read. I have a group of about forty people who will forward things of interest to me as they encounter them. But this is all rather on an ad hoc basis and we need to have a more formal system. This is an area for the future, and will have a significant impact on the future uses of Computer Technology. This area I'd call "Information Consulting" using the analogy of current 'programming' consultants. What I see as happening in the future is that we will 'subscribe' to services that will monitor large databases of information and forward to us the subset of the information that *THE MONITOR* finds interesting. As with movie reviews, we will bounce from information consultant to information consultant until we find one that seems to report all the information we're interested in... In a sense, that is exactly what I do as the moderator/facilitator of this discussion forum - I glean articles from books, magazines, and various networks and distribute them to the subset of the population that is interested in reading about what *I*, as the moderator, think the 'group' as a whole will be interested in. It is most certainly NOT a democratic thing. And therein lies one of the significant dangers of the information consultant. As Milton Wessel says in "Freedom's Edge: The Computer Threat to Society"; "The advantages of such a computerized morgue [database of old news paper articles, for the NY Times, in this instance] may be substan- tial, but the dangers of perpetuating errors, opinion, or just The Times' own selection of what is worth preserving and what is not are serious and may even outweigh the benefits. History will be what The Times says it is..." To apply that to this digest, there might be information that I don't initially consider of potential interest to this group that no-one else catches, or thinks about, since they didn't hear it through this forum. In this particular forum it isn't critical, but for a new medical research results or financial database filter... So I've raised a number of issues that can be further discussed; o The advantages of Information Consultants o The disadvantages and Dangers of Information Consultants o How to use them, and how they can fit in to society o Other ways to deal with information overload, as it is becoming commonly referred to. I look forward to an interesting discussion on these important topics and close with a comment that Sweden has had a database licensing branch of the government since the early 1970s... -- Dave Taylor
taylor@hplabsc.UUCP (Dave Taylor) (11/05/86)
This article is from well!mandel@hplabs.HP.COM (Thomas F. Mandel) and was received on Tue Nov 4 21:47:20 1986 Regarding information consultants, it seems to me that at the moment it's useful to make some distinctions about the setting in which information consulting occurs. On the Well -- a large (3500+ user), Picospan/Unix- based regional computer conferencing system in the San Francisco Bay Area -- there is an enormous amount of ad hoc information consulting. Some of this is very focused, e.g., what is a good printer for doing such and such work with an IBM PC. Some of it waxes and wanes between poles of bantering and "serious" exchanges of information, e.g., in the Sexuality conference on the Well, conversation may go along for a while about this or that sexual issue, then focus in quickly on hard data, and then go back to bantering. Sometimes specific new topics emerge briefly to cover particular topics, e.g., a recent conference devoted to some issues of concern to the Office of Technology Assessment, and then vanish. (In such conferences, there is fairly high quality of information consulting.) In some settings, hosts or moderators play a large role, in others, they do not. On the other hand, I participate (as a sort of information consultant) in a private Notepad conference, in which my client has a preference for hard, useful information to answer questions -- some of the time. Other times, at least until something really "important" comes up, the participants toss out new ideas about whatever they they might be interesting. What I'm trying to say, rather inelegantly I'm afraid, is that the context of information consulting is quite varied and is a major factor in trying to discuss the roles, responsibilities, ethics, and whatever of information consulting. Tom Mandel mandel@sri-kl.arpa or hplabs!well!mandel