Another depressing analysis of the signs of our time

The author, Nicholas Carr, is credible, though sometimes I wish he weren’t. He writes at Rough Type, if you are stalwart enough for more. I have been reading his posts, now and then, for several years.

“It would be nice if we could engineer a more informed citizenry by simply cranking up the flow of information. But we can’t. Despite being inundated with data and messages, Americans today don’t seem any better informed than they were before the arrival of the Web.

A Pew Research Center study found that Americans’ knowledge of current affairs didn’t change significantly between 1989 and 2007, the two decades when online information stores, news sites and sharing tools exploded. And the least informed age group remained the youngest, the 18- to 29-year-old’s who are also the most avid users of social media. ‘Digital revolutions,’ the researchers concluded, ‘have had little impact on how much Americans know about national and international affairs.’”

Apparently, there is also Rougher Type. The author is the same, but the content is more mild. I hope it continues.

Post-script

Now THIS is interesting! I found a March 2007 post written by Biz Stone of Twitter founder fame. @biz critiques …. Nicholas Carr’s critique of Twitter! It is quite sweet-natured and of course, very meta in hindsight.

chartsnthings:

On Thursday, Facebook had the third-largest I.P.O. ever. In the week leading up it, my colleague Amanda Cox spent some time thinking how to best explain and contextualize this offering to readers. What follows is a series of sketches from Amanda, who shared her project folder with me…

O.M.G. It must be seen. It cannot be unseen. It is a clear case of 

Data Absurdity

A reader whose Facebook account was hacked wasn’t happy with the company’s efforts to assist, so he asked the Haggler for help.

30% of companies have no strategy for “data hygiene” – removing duplicates or obsolete information… [Also] data decay is increasing rapidly.

What can be done? Well, a good start would be a regularly scheduled data integrity check.

Like a health inspector, you can’t expect to check every restaurant daily – but responding to complaints and maintaining a rigorous plan for oversight is a good policy.

A well-publicized program for testing data accuracy responds to enterprise inquiries about what you know, and how you know.

Then you can confidently answer the question “Are you sure?”

Somewhat long-winded article about a very important topic: Consistent standards and definitions.

The next post in the series seems promising. The author says she will be describing an example, of the challenges faced by a company with dozens of “Employee ID” definitions. I will try to remember to post the link!