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From: taylor@hplabsc.UUCP (Dave Taylor)
Newsgroups: mod.comp-soc
Subject: People as Information Filters and Organizers
Message-ID: <792@hplabsc.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 27-Oct-86 21:18:06 EST
Article-I.D.: hplabsc.792
Posted: Mon Oct 27 21:18:06 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 28-Oct-86 03:43:37 EST
Reply-To: hplabs!taylor (Dave Taylor, The Moderator)
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Laboratories
Lines: 85
Approved: taylor@hplabs

Kathy Vincent introduces an interesting point to the forum that I'd like
to expand upon.  She says;

> I think, too, that the software and the BBS are only as good as the person 
> using it and setting up the BBS....Many of the BBS's are run by kids, kids 
> who don't have a good sense of order and of how much structure can help 
> people get around in a BBS.

It seems like we're talking about a specific example of the value of 
people as information Filters and Organizers.   The current generation of
computer information uses the computer as the filter and organizer, for the
most part (witness any bulletin board or conferencing system).  There is
some human interaction in as much as people occasionally will use peer pressure
to stop a line of discussion, or a moderator may refuse an article (as I have
done once or twice in this digest).  For the most part though, the order and
organization is imposed by the author at the time the information is
submitted.

This has many adverse effects, not the least of which are those that
Kathy brings up - information being hard to find and hard to understand.
Other problems are since the discussion lacks a rational organization
it tends to wander and sometimes never seems to answer the initial questions
or points addressed initially.  (This isn't always a bad thing - for those
systems that parallel social interaction this is good - next time you're talking
to a group of people at a party keep track of the topics you reach...)

On some networks, notably USENET, the problem is sufficiently great, and
sufficiently amplified by the volume of postings, that a large number of
people that could and should contribute to the discussions don't because
they don't have the time or interest to weed through the postings.  This is
also greatly worsened by the distributed nature of the USENET - the propogation
delay is enough to cause multiple, often different, answers to the same 
question and discussions that get 'out of sync'.  

The solutions that have evolved so far are quite illuminating - the most 
typical being a network of friends who mail each other 'interesting' postings
from areas and groups they suspect the other doesn't read.  I have a group
of about forty people who will forward things of interest to me as they
encounter them.  But this is all rather on an ad hoc basis and we need to
have a more formal system.

This is an area for the future, and will have a significant impact on the
future uses of Computer Technology.  This area I'd call "Information Consulting"
using the analogy of current 'programming' consultants.  What I see as 
happening in the future is that we will 'subscribe' to services that will
monitor large databases of information and forward to us the subset of the
information that *THE MONITOR* finds interesting.  As with movie reviews, we
will bounce from information consultant to information consultant until we
find one that seems to report all the information we're interested in...

In a sense, that is exactly what I do as the moderator/facilitator of this
discussion forum - I glean articles from books, magazines, and various
networks and distribute them to the subset of the population that is interested
in reading about what *I*, as the moderator, think the 'group' as a whole will
be interested in.  It is most certainly NOT a democratic thing.

And therein lies one of the significant dangers of the information consultant.
As Milton Wessel says in "Freedom's Edge: The Computer Threat to Society";

	"The advantages of such a computerized morgue [database of old news
         paper articles, for the NY Times, in this instance] may be substan-
	 tial, but the dangers of perpetuating errors, opinion, or just The
	 Times' own selection of what is worth preserving and what is not are
	 serious and may even outweigh the benefits.  History will be what The
	 Times says it is..."

To apply that to this digest, there might be information that I don't 
initially consider of potential interest to this group that no-one else
catches, or thinks about, since they didn't hear it through this forum.  In
this particular forum it isn't critical, but for a new medical research results
or financial database filter...

So I've raised a number of issues that can be further discussed;

	o  The advantages of Information Consultants
	o  The disadvantages and Dangers of Information Consultants
	o  How to use them, and how they can fit in to society
	o  Other ways to deal with information overload, as it is becoming
	   commonly referred to.

I look forward to an interesting discussion on these important topics and
close with a comment that Sweden has had a database licensing branch of the
government since the early 1970s...

						-- Dave Taylor