Information and Existence

We hear the term information everywhere these days. I myself have used that term quite often in my previous blogs.? Now, let’s see why information is so important. Information technologists say “It’s all about information”. Let’s see how.

Let’s start from what we have in front of us. Look at your desktop for example. The system you are using is the hardware. What runs inside it is the software, or in other words programs. What do these programs use? That’s what’s information. Programs manipulate, generate and transfer information. It’s not just with the desktop. Look at any system in our common-life. Look at yourself; Your body is the hardware. You have a genetic code, blood group, blood pressure level, body temperature etc, these all are the information needed to run you. Information is not just the numbers, it’s not just the code, information is what there is.

Every system in the universe has three levels associated to it. Hardware, program (code) and the bottom level- information. Let’s look at another simple example to understand the concept completely. I have this book on C# here. The book is the hardware, it is written in English, so English or the words used are the code, so what is the information? What you understand when you read the book is the information. You are not paying for the hardware while you pay say $50 for a book, you are not paying for the words in it either, You are paying for the information lying between the words. What Information Technology does is to find ways to improve organizing, reproducing, generating, manipulating and transferring the information.

Is it just information technology that does all these stuff with information? No, all sciences, arts, and everything we do everyday is manipulation of the information in one way or another. What do physicists do? They use mathematics as a tool and find out the laws of nature. From a physicist’s perspective, the universe is the hardware, mathematical equations are the codes, and the assumptions he reach are the information. So normally we will start thinking, what is the use of information? Is that just to cure our curiosity? Information is valuable. We already know that. So if someone can generate or manipulate information in a better way than someone else he has the power. So the more information you have the more powerful you are.

In the world of Information, each and every information produced(revealed) has a comparative value. There, the value of truth need not always be greater than a lie. A well coded lie will have better value than a weakly coded truth. So if the information is accompanied with a code, that is better. If you can provide the hardware too, the value becomes even better.

In this social networking era , information is everywhere. We get information about everyone and everything over the internet. Unlike the early days, survival has larger dimensions now. According to the Darwinian evolution , only the fittest survives. These days, survival is not just about food and shelter, it’s about satisfaction and freedom. Only those who possess better information survive in a society. Others are just too insignificant creatures.

Googling on facebook.

"Google it." Nobody used to use this phrase eight or ten years ago. Google and Facebook have become a part of our everyday life. . There are websites like twitter, myspace and a many other search engines and social networking sites but, google and facebook are the sites approved by the mass of the present era, so i choose to talk about them. What do these two applications do to us? They provide us information. Someone posts on their wall about the drastic climate they have in the particular area they reside and everyone connected to them are getting information about the climate in that particular region. On your Facebook wall, more and more information is appearing each and every minute. The amount of information you accumulate is directly proportional to the frequency of your visit on your news-feed and the number of people/applications you are connected to.
Those who work in I T field has classified web applications into two categories, push and pull. Google is an example for pull application while facebook uses push technology. As the names imply users pull information from Google while facebook pushes information to users. The information that facebook pushes need not always be relevent to the needs of the user. If search engines try to give the users what they ask for, social networking sites give them what the users want to share. In many of the cases people just blurt on their walls. So, the users get what others in the network want to share. Users are constrained to think, express and form relations in certain ways. This has serious effects on the culture which forms outside computer monitor.
So, if search engines were providing everything user "wanted", why do we have webtechnologies which use pull approach? The reason is that people don't want to use that extra energy in searching if everything they want could be accessed just by opening their facebook page. Latest news about everything and everyone they know, people's personal information, flight timings, entertainment etc etc. Then, what is wrong with facebook? No, I'm not going to talk about the privacy issues. Facebook provides us the information we don't want to know. And many of the useful information get lost in the piles of junk data that fall everywhere around us.
What can we do to make facebook a better place? How can we integrate push and pull approaches to make information gathering or entertainment more effective? One possible solution will be a better and effective customization. People should be able to find their interests make the posts available more easily. Secondly they should be able to manage the information more effectively, by marking them or saving under different categories. If this is made possible, users will be able to scroll through the information which has been there for ages as well as which is getting updated every minute.