Drowning in TMI
Drowning in TMI
Hundreds of millions of blogs, thousands of Twits, online video in the UK up 47% (source: comScore), US Facebook use up 699% and Twitter 3,712% in the last year (sources: comScore and Nielsen) – and all those Youtube videos… it’s got people worrying there’s just TMI (toooo much information) in the world. If we were still printing it and putting it in outboxes, inboxes, pending trays and big grey metal filing cabinets, there would be.
But there’s been a shift. The first, of course, is to digital. But then some bright spark worked out that in today and tomorrow’s oceans of information, filing won’t cut it anymore.
That’s because there’s an essential problem with filing. Each thing can only go in one file. So that restaurant receipt from Budapest’s Cafe Kor can either go in (1) expenses, or (2) Budapest, or (3) great restaurants. It can’t go in all three.
That’s a shame because filing things gives them meaning. It means instead of having a pile of stuff on the floor (even if that’s a digital floor) you have organised piles. You know where to go to get something and filing gives something context and meaning. It means we can make sense of stuff. Just think of genus, species etc that biologists and botanists use.
But in a world where there’s zillions of new pieces of information being created every day, filing doesn’t work anymore. It’s too restrictive, too clunky, takes too much time to think about.
But then along came tagging and the problem of TMI was solved.
Tagging means that your pile of information on the floor can magically rearrange itself as soon as you call out the tag. Call ‘restaurants’ and everything you’ve marked restaurants gathers in a group to say hello. Call ‘Budapest’ and ditto. Which means TMI data becomes JIT (just-in-time) information. Which makes for knowledge when put into our lovely human hands.
With the exponential increase in data being produced and our need to manage it even more keen than ever, this is not only essential – but becoming increasingly sophisticated. There’s now geotagging, social tagging and now even, with the advent of augmented reality ‘air tagging’.
Which means that instead of drowning in oceans of TMI – as some commentators worried – we can find what we want, when we want it, JIT. We’re swimming on top of the seas of information thanks to tagging.
