Even infrequent visits to a local bookstore would bear witness to the explosion in stress, self-help, and information “coping” titles of the last decade.
Richard Saul Wurman—best known as the progenitor of the TED conferences, author of Information Anxiety, and designer of the ACCESS Guides—identified a condition he coined as “information anxiety.” Information anxiety refers to the state of increasing discontinuity between what we actually understand and what we think we should understand. We are being inundated with tremendous amounts of information, most of which is useless, some of which is useful, and little of which is really important. Only recently have we realized that most of our information anxiety problems are caused by failing to recognize the interconnections of various pieces of knowledge.
To get a handle on information dis-ease, it’s helpful to inventory the various components of what we commonly refer to as information—the raw material most of us will work with for the foreseeable future. The core task performed by most information workers is actually a four-phase refinement process that could be referred to, somewhat facetiously, as the “getting of wisdom.”
- Data can be recognized as that body of unassimilated observations and objective facts that make up the raw materials used by knowledge workers to create, or at least form, useful information.
- Information is nothing more (or less) than organized data. The data have usually been organized by someone else, however, and maintain a thin patina of objectivity.
- Knowledge is simply organized information. At this stage, information is organized and internalized by the individual. Knowledge is information that you have managed to integrate with everything else you already know.
- Wisdom is fully-integrated knowledge—that which you “know in your bones”—bits of knowledge that have been made even more useful by the nature of their relationships to other bits of knowledge.
Our tools for turning the raw resource of information into knowledge haven’t managed to keep up with the amount of information we are bombarded with on a daily basis. We become uncomfortable when we can’t find what we need to know in a growing mountain of formless data. Anyone returning from a week’s vacation to find a hundred or more messages demanding immediate attention, has experienced what Wurman identifies as information anxiety.
Unfortunately, that mountain of formless data continues to grow in an out-of-control manner. Imagine the repercussions of being inundated with more information on a daily basis—from a single information source—than our ancestors managed in their entire lifetimes. Wurman writes, “a weekday edition of the New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in a lifetime in seventeenth-century England.”
Complex information is more easily understood when it is presented in a series of contiguous hierarchical layers, like the layers of an onion. The recipient of the information ideally should be able to peel away layer after layer of information, traveling deeper and deeper into the specifics of the body of information. This information layering helps us refocus ourselves in relation to the continual bombardment of information.
An entire new profession—that of the information architect—has formed around the need to make information more accessible, navigable, and manageable by its intended audience. The term “information architect” was coined by Wurman in 1976 but didn’t come into common use until the advent of complex Web sites in the late 1990s. Wurman, in his 1996 Information Architects, identifies a practitioner in the field as:
“1) the individual who organizes the patterns inherent in data, making the complex clear. 2) a person who creates the structure or map of information which allows others to find their personal paths to knowledge. 3) the emerging 21st century professional occupation addressing the needs of the age focused upon clarity, human understanding, and the science of the organization of information.”
Wurman offers a model for this onion-like layering of information. He calls his model the Five Rings, based on the degree of immediacy that various types of information have for us in our daily lives. According to Wurman, “the rings radiate out from the most personal information that is essential for our physical survival to the most abstract form of information that encompasses our personal myths, cultural development, and sociological perspective.”
Figure 1-1: Richard Saul Wurman’s Five Rings of Information Immediacy.
- Cultural Information. The outermost ring in Wurman’s model is cultural information. This is our history, philosophy, and arts. It represents our attempts to understand our culture. This is where information accumulated from the other layers is combined to build the information set that determines our attitudes and our beliefs.
- News Information. Current events that have only a relatively minor impact on our daily lives comprise the news level. Most of the information we receive from the media falls into this category. When we learn the name of the political candidates in Peru, for example, it’s news information. This type of information, while not impacting directly on our lives, influences us in more subtle ways including the shaping of our individual conception of the world around us.
- Reference Information. This layer is made up of information sources including textbooks, directories, encyclopedias, maps, dictionaries, and telephone books. We use reference information when we research a specific topic, such as the year Portugal declared its independence or the phone number of a local city council member.
- Conversational Information. Conversational information is comprised of all the verbal and written exchanges of information that we have with people around us. Wurman identifies this form of information as a main source and the one we most easily ignore. Conversational information can range from the banal (“What’s your name?” What do you do for a living?”) to the poignant (“What do you think about the proposed water referendum?”). Information in this layer is also the most easily controllable. This is the layer Wurman tells us that we should focus most intensely on if we are to gain greater control over our own information spaces.
- Internal Information. Internal information is defined as the collection of cerebral messages that enables our bodies to function. When we feel pain or hunger, for example, we are dealing with internal information. This is the type of information over which we have the least control but that affects us the most.
