So, most people by now will agree that we're living at the start of a new age of human development - the 'Information Age,' as most call it, named like the Bronze Age and Industrial Age after the product most important for that age. (Of course, there is quite a bit of argument over when this age exactly started - some, for example, believe like me that the Information Age started after World War II, with the Heterotopia [er, the internet] being the first mature product of the age, like Ford's assembly line was the first mature product of the Industrial Age.) And if you're anything like me, it might strike you as just so surreal sometimes, that we live in an age where the most precious commodity we have is not tangible at all, but is simply data on a computer screen or a reference book full of numbers. I mean, doesn't that bastardize the entire concept of commodity in the first place? Isn't an inherent part of why we consider something 'precious' its innate physical usability? That's why we count gold as a precious metal, right, because it has so many useful real-world applications, and is hard to find, so naturally becomes a valuable thing to us.

But thus is human progression, I suppose, that we are living in an age where more and more physical aspects of our existence are getting perfected, and that communicative technology is allowing us to keep in instant contact with billions of people around the world at once. (And let's not forget that we've gone backwards before in history as well - that we had a 'Dark Age' where most of human knowledge was lost or destroyed, and humans actually reverted to a more primitive state for several hundred years. It's not guaranteed that human progression always goes forward; it's just been that way for a long time, that's all, to the point that we assume it's always true now.) Now that we're good at growing the majority of our food ourselves, instead of constantly hunting and foraging (the lesson perfected during the Agricultural Age), and now that we have machines that can take care of most of that food production automatically (the lesson perfected during the Industrial Age), our main problem now is in keeping the entire myriad of people communicating who are now a part of growing, distributing and selling that food, with it sometimes being consumed halfway across the planet a mere day or two after it was harvested to begin with.

And this has been the general trend of humanity over the last several hundred years, to tell you the truth - a move from a completely self-sufficient unit (one family, for example, that grows all its own food, makes all its own clothes, provides all its own entertainment, fixes its own house, etc), but who spends every waking moment of their lives doing these things, to a unit who is merely a small cog in the entire world machine (where they mostly purchase the food they eat, the clothes they wear, etc), but who has a lot more free time, is a lot healthier, and isn't required to do so much back-breaking labor just to exist. And now that we're getting better at actually growing, producing, building, distributing and selling all the things we need to survive, what's become most important is the information that allows us to be a happy cog in that giant complex global machine that is our modern society.

And so, of course, many of us naturally think that in this Information Age of ours, pure information is the most valuable commodity at one's disposal - raw numbers, raw lists, the more the better, the bigger the more valuable. Certainly, if you misinterpret the early lessons of the Heterotopia, I can see why people would jump to this conclusion. Who won the online bookstore wars, after all? The site that was able to offer the purely largest amount of things for sale. Who's always considered the winner of the search-engine wars at any given point? Whoever has the most web pages cached and ready to search. What are the most popular online newspapers? The ones with the most information at their sites. Who won the online auction wars? The site with the most things to bid on. (These are all wrong assumptions, by the way, but I'll get into that tomorrow.)

And indeed, with me voluntarily being in the middle of this Age with the various jobs I've chosen to do over the years (writer, secretary, copywriter, arts administrator, etc), I've certainly seen a lot of prophesizing about all this raw collection of information that's been happening over the last decade, both laughably optimistic and laughably panic-striken. I love, for example, all those precious little authors who are just so bent out of shape these days over Google Print, the company's new effort to make all paper-based information in the history of time available and searchable on the web. And these were the same people who started having a fit when the Heterotopia first got popular to begin with - who were wringing their hands over the idea of their books being available in any electronic form, and their unshakable belief that the very first thing that would happen in such a situation is that their books will suddenly start getting endlessly duplicated and distributed, like the precious commodities we all know they are. And then there is the opposite situation, which also tickles me to no end - all the Information Age cheerleaders, those who are constantly crowing about 'long tail' this and 'microformats' that, who argue that the mere access to all this raw information is going to transform our society in ways we can't even imagine yet.

Both groups are needlessly emotional about it all, of course, because both are forgetting a very important thing - that just as important as the access to raw information is the ability to sort, analyze and easily distribute this information, and that this flavors any discussion of the Information Age just as heavily as what information is available to begin with. Because let's face it, the mere collection of information is nothing new for us humans, and the lessons we've already learned can help us immensely in this new Age we're now growing into. And this I think is probably the most important existing lesson we can remember about it all - that just because information exists doesn't mean that it's useful, unless we can easily and powerfully interact with it.

Let's take the subject of television, for example, since it has been around a lot longer and has been obsessively recorded a lot longer than something like the web. TV, in fact, has been broadcasting for something like 60 or 70 years straight now, and certainly for at least the last 40 or so of those years there have been a number of organizations come into existence, that do nothing else but document these broadcasts and store them as pervasively as possible.

There exists, in fact, recordings of just about every second of television aired in the last forty years of history, almost all of it accessible in one form or another. So in theory, right, that means that we should never lose track of any of that stuff that exists, because it's all been archived and can be accessed by a growing amount of people anytime they want. So how is it that every couple of years, some minor cable channel can "resurrect" some old TV show from the '60s or '70s, start airing it constantly 'cause they picked up the rights for a song, and suddenly have millions of people say, "This show is brilliant! Why have I never heard of it before? How could this show have been so funny and so popular, and yet not a single one of us remembered that it ever existed?"

And the answer, of course, is that we can't actually remember all information that's ever been recorded, or be able to instantly access it in our brains, because that's beyond our human abilities. The numbers are changing by the day, of course, but most people in fact currently believe that humans can simultaneously contemplate no more than seven to ten concepts at once, and that the rest of our brains are completely inaccessible while we are busy with these seven to ten ponderable items. In this respect, then, I like what a person like David Allen has to say about things, the guy who invented the "Getting Things Done" time-management system (and an opinion shared by many intriguing futurists as well) - that we can see these information systems as "external brains" if we want, ones that can hold and instantly access a ton of more information than our human brains can. In the case of GTD, for example, Allen is talking about a system of external notes, for jotting down every random thought you have about where you see your life going - everything from a reminder to go grocery shopping that afternoon, to the fact that you'd love to learn how to sail, if you just happen to find yourself rich when you're older. Then what Allen has done is create a systematic way of referring to these lists (some once a month, some once a week, others every day), so that you no longer have to try to keep all this info juggling in your imperfect human brain - so that you only access them when you need them, and let that "external brain" deal with the long-term storage of those thoughts. It's not the lists themselves that are valuable on their own; it's the lists combined with how you access those lists, how you interact with the information found there.

And so we can also view these television organizations that have just so many thousands of hours of videotape now recorded; that it's not just the tapes themselves that are important, but how we interact with the information found on those tapes. And this now brings up what I'm convinced is going to become one of the most valuable and prolific type of workers in the mature Information Age, just like the "manager" suddenly rose in importance during the Industrial Age; that is, the job of information analysis, or of specializing in interacting with the kind of information we're talking about here, so that your customers don't have to themselves. For example, this is exactly what my main job is going to be as the owner of this arts center I'm trying to put together these days, with all my other jobs somehow based off it - I will be in charge of interacting with as many raw numbers of artists as I can stand, and picking a certain amount of these artists as somehow the most worthwhile for my paying customers.

This certainly will sometimes not be a fun job - sometimes it will involve going out to dozens of crappy open mics that I don't particularly want to attend, dozens of undergraduate photography shows, reading dozens of crappy manuscripts. But this is what my audience wants; they want good underground artists, and they don't want to spend the time themselves wading through all the bad ones, so are happy to pay my organization some money for us to do it for them. And this is no different than, for example, me watching a minor cable channel one night while high; I want funny old TV shows from the '60s and '70s, don't want to wade through the hundreds of crappy shows from back then to find them, so "pay" this cable channel to do the work for me (by watching their commercials, which is how they make their money).

This I guess is what always makes me laugh so hard, every time I see an author get all uptight about electronic versions of their work existing online - just that unmitigated gall in assuming that their crappy, delicate little coming-of-age novel is going to instantly be the focal point of international piracy and counterfeiting attempts, for no other reason than that it exists. Christ, that's a lot of balls! Hey, I'm not saying that I'm a bestselling author myself or anything, but I have had some of my electronic books downloaded tens of thousands of times; but even with that, though, there are lots of other books in my own catalog that have only been read by, what, twenty people on the entire planet? Ten sometimes? Even though they've been online for years as well and are completely free to download as well.

The reason certain books of mine are downloaded a lot is because of circumstance - when a book is particularly racy, or is talked about a lot by other people, or in some cases when I've done an active promotional campaign for it. But if a book is originally published in relative obscurity, it's most likely going to remain in relative obscurity, no matter whether an electronic copy of it exists and billions of people suddenly have instant free online access to it. And it's for the same reason that lots of gems from '60s and '70s television still remain secrets as well, even though they've been available to the general public for four decades; because there's just simply too much crap for us humans to handle, so more and more in our modern world we are relying on others to analyze this crap for us, and to pay them to present us with what they think are the things most worthy of our attention.

So I guess really the more intriguing question to contemplate is how these external analyzers are doing - of what new theories about information analysis are coming out of this new Age we're living in, of what theories are working and what aren't. And this of course is a vastly complicated subject unto itself, because there are so many ephemeral elements involved - the legitimacy of the group doing the analysis, how large an audience that analyst has, how faithfully they follow his advice, etc. And this then just gets into a whole series of interesting case studies going on these days, like iTunes' recent adoption of the podcast format, the Associated Press' recent adoption of the RSS format, the rise of citizen journalists, their relationship with traditional news outlets, the importance of Steven Spielberg's Shoah Project and more. But I'm out of space for today, so it'll all have to wait until tomorrow.