In my last post I talked about information and what it is. Today's post is about how people use it and work with it.
We use information to decide what to do and to communicate. Let's try to see what we can learn from this description, even though it's pretty simple and abstract.
All our actions are based on our understanding of the world around us. Most of the time we process information to improve that understanding to make better decisions based on it. We work with information to understand it better, to find meaning in it. We simplify it, arrange it in familiar patterns and relate to existing information (effectively incorporating what we learn with what we already know).
Communicating information is sharing it with other people (or ourselves when we forget something). Effective communication can be hard, even if you are just leaving notes for yourself. We need to understand information involved (like we do when deciding what to do) or remember and reproduce exact data (but people are usually pretty bad at that). In addition we need some way to store and present information. Quite often we present it in the same form as it is stored. When we write in the notebook we see everything in the form it is written (stored).
It seems that how we work with information is similar whether we want to communicate it or do something. In either case we need to understand it well. Having a good method to store and present it is also very helpful. This is a list of goals we usually have when working with information:
- Simplify - Like computers, people have limited memory and can process only so much information effectively. We want to reduce amount of data we work with to make it easier for us. To do that we can remove any duplication and irrelevant data, and enumerate similar data by assuming it is the same. The downside is that we can get less accurate picture as we eliminate data, so balance of how much information is simplified is important
- Capture information - Store it on some media. This is important both to share it and to analyze it. It's important for analysis because we, again, have a limited memory problem and can often process only a portion of data. We need to store the rest of the data while we are working on a part of it to be able to come back to it later.
- Capture relationships - Describe how smaller pieces of data relate to each other and how new information is related to existing information (where it fits in the larger picture).
- Display - How we see the information determines what it means to us and how we work with it. We often choose the most suitable way to show it depending on what we want to do. For example people are much better at understanding pictures then numbers. Yet numbers are often much more accurate then pictures.
Correct tools can greatly help us with any of the above operations. We have been inventing them since the beginning of mankind. Actually they are so common now that we use a lot of them without much thought, writing in a notebook for example. Yet I think tools and how we use them can be greatly improved to make our lives easier. In the next post I want to explore that to see what's done right, what's done wrong and can be improved.