What we want: a modern, connected, intelligent world that can do more than make things and make things better.
Source: The Guardian article Why the internet is dying.
We’ve all seen the old ads: “Buy this thing, we’ll tell you what it is”.
But it doesn’t look that way.
“There’s a lot of data in it, but you can’t get a really clear picture of how much of it is actually relevant or useful,” says Matthew Lohman, professor of digital media at the University of Oxford.
It’s important to realise that a lot can change in the next two decades, he says.
“It’s important for us to remember that the internet, which we’re building on the foundation of, was born and is still built on a bedrock of very good quality information.
That information is often useful, and is often a bit biased.”
So, what can we do?
“We need to be able to say, ‘We need a better internet for this to happen’,” says Lohmen.
“That means not only that we have to be aware of the fact that there is a lot we don’t know about the future of information, but that we need to understand the way in which information is being generated and that the information that we’re producing is being made relevant to our needs and to our aspirations.”
Lohmans group has worked with many organisations to design a model of information that can be used to inform the future.
The idea is to combine the information generated by the internet and the information needed to make decisions that are useful and relevant to consumers, Lohms team has been working on for the last 15 years.
“The internet is not a new thing, but it’s a very different way of thinking about the internet than what we’ve seen before,” he says, adding that the future is not going to be about connecting everything, but rather connecting us all.
And that means that information has to be used in a way that is both useful and useful for consumers.
In a world of endless data and endless information, there’s a growing need for better tools to help us make sense of that information and make decisions.
This includes better tools that can give us a sense of the content we’re being presented with and the quality of the information we’re getting, says Lothman.
“We’ve seen that we’ve got a lot more data, and we have a lot less data than we used to,” he adds.
But it’s still important that we know how to make sense out of it.
“Information is an information-rich resource, and so we need tools to enable us to do that, which means that we also need to have better tools for making informed decisions,” he concludes.
The key, says Adam Farrar, director of research at the digital and digital media research firm WPP, is that these tools need to evolve.
“At the same time, we need an understanding of how information is generated and stored, which is going to help organisations make decisions,” says Farrary.
“If you can get a better sense of how data is being used and to what extent that information is really relevant and relevant, you can then make better decisions.”
“It is possible that a good example of how to build better tools is an example of the right way of doing business.”
The problem is that “information is an all-or-nothing resource”, he says “you either have a good piece of information or you don’t.”
So there are some decisions that we don “need” to make, says FARRAR.
But he adds that there are other decisions that need to take place before we can make those decisions, and he believes that some of those decisions could be made by making use of data that isn’t currently available to us.
For example, if we’re looking to get a new job or to buy a house, we can’t use the internet to help decide whether that should be the case.
Instead, it needs to be based on a “better case study” that is “better for people”, he argues.
And as we learn more about how information has been used to make those sorts of decisions, the tools to make better use of that data will become more powerful.
“This is something that we are beginning to see happen in real-time,” he continues.
“As we have more information about the information and the data that we consume, there is more information that is being collected that is more relevant to how we make decisions.”
In other words, the better tools we can build, the more information we can use to make more informed decisions.
And in the coming years, we will need better tools in order to do so.
What we need: better tools and better decisions to help make the future better and better for all, says Andrew Cusack,