Signs the Information Age Has Misplaced the Information
The information age was supposed to place the accumulated knowledge of civilization at everyone’s fingertips. Instead, much of that information appears to have been put somewhere safe until somebody can remember where.
Researchers at the National Center for Information Retrieval report that Americans now spend an average of forty-seven minutes locating information they previously possessed.
“We have unprecedented access to human knowledge,” said Dr. Leonard Fisk, 59, an information scientist who keeps screenshots of his passwords in a folder labeled Taxes. “Unfortunately, nobody remembers whether that knowledge was in an email, a text, a browser tab, a cloud, another cloud, or something called My Drive.”
The problem has spread beyond individuals. Last month, the Department of Transportation temporarily lost a six-hundred-page infrastructure report after officials determined that everyone had downloaded a copy but nobody knew which one was final.
Files recovered during the search included FINAL.pdf, FINAL2.pdf, FINAL_USE_THIS.pdf, FINAL_REVISED.pdf, and FINAL_REVISED_ACTUAL.pdf. None was the desired report.
“We remain confident the document exists,” said Marjorie Venn, 46, a federal records administrator who prints important emails and then photographs them with her phone. “Several people remember seeing it.”
Information specialists say search engines have compounded the problem by returning millions of answers to questions nobody asked, while the desired information remains three results below an advertisement for something vaguely related.
Corporate America has responded with knowledge-management systems designed to put everything in one place. Most companies now have seven. Employees routinely search email, Slack, Teams, SharePoint, Dropbox, Google Drive, project-management software, and a folder somebody named Resources in 2019. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence can summarize a three-hundred-page report in six seconds, provided somebody can find the report.
Fisk believes civilization may eventually solve the problem. “We know more than any society in history,” he said. “We just do not know where we put it.”
Want more digital blasphemy? Fill your boots at technological mayhem.