National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway.
Information is the currency of democracy.
Thomas Jefferson
What's information really about? It seems to me there's something
direly wrong with the "Information Economy." It's not about data,
it's about attention. In a few years you may be able to carry the
Library of Congress around in your hip pocket. So? You're never
gonna read the Library of Congress. You'll die long before you
access one tenth of one percent of it. What's important --
increasingly important -- is the process by which you figure out
what to look at. This is the beginning of the real and true
economics of information. Not who owns the books, who prints the
books, who has the holdings. The crux here is access, not
holdings. And not even access itself, but the signposts that tell
you what to access -- what to pay attention to. In the
Information Economy everything is plentiful -- except attention.
Bruce Sterling, from a speech to the
Library Information Technology Association
June 1992, San Francisco CA
When I user a word it means exactly what I want it to mean,
nothing more and nothing less.
Humpty Dumpty from Alice in Wonderland
It's not the bits, it's the about the bits.
Nicholas Negroponte
Before we go any further here, has it ever occurred to any of you that
all this is simply one grand misunderstanding? Since you're not here to
learn anything, but to be taught so you can pass these tests, knowledge
has to be organized so it can be taught, and it has to be reduced to
information so it can be organized; do you follow that?
In other words, this leads you to assume that organization is an
inherent property of the knowledge itself, and that disorder and chaos
are simply irrelevant forces that threaten it from outside.
In fact it's exactly the opposite. Order is simply a thin, perilous
condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos...
William Gaddis, JR
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