Information Delinquency

As I sit down to reflect on what is information doing to our modern life, I begin to see the other side of the stories, besides all the wonders, promises and high expectations of Information Technology that supposedly can transform this society for a better tomorrow.

Information is undoubtedly an integral part of our living system. It is hard to imagine any system with human participation without the use of information. A rather sophisticated information mechanism permeates in educational system, business, economic, political systems, etc. whether from the users' perspective in term of friendliness of usage, or organisers' perspective in term of intelligent software and complex hardware.

There is one dominant characteristic in the infinite ways of information usage : SPEED in the Borderless world. It is both exciting and frightening, as I ponder further. There are multitudes of reasoning on the former, that is, glorification of its advantages and good potential, but I dig deeper into the later, the seemingly unseen and unknown evil force that is being created.

I begin by looking a the most wondrous system : body system that all of us can experience. A healthy body system is a system in harmony and in good order. It is a self-regulating, and self-organising system, constantly evolving and emerging from a physical to more intelligent system. If one part of the body system decides to "dislocate" from the whole and carries out its processes in high gear speed, we can easily imagine its disastrous consequences. For example: blood circulation increases its speed 50 times faster, or, we take in food, suddenly 20 times faster. It also sounds like some symptoms of cancerous growth taking place, like, fast degradation of certain types of cells. A drastic change in speed is certainly upsetting a bodily system, which we can feel and comprehend. What about the impact created by the speed of information?

In ancient time speed had its relative place. Goods were sent by the limited capability, for example, by manpower, horses, sailing boats, etc. Messages, containing information, were carried by men in whatever mode of carriers available. Goods and information were somehow flowing, or being transported, with similar speed. Then came telephone, telegraph and aeroplane. Information, was then not only travelling at must faster speed then before, it crossed continents with ease. But there were still restriction to the amount of information that can be "transported" by telephone and telegraph. Courier service using aeroplane is also restricted by the physical contents as information materials, besides the flight schedules.

But the computer technology changed the whole landscape of information flow.

There is almost no restriction whatsoever. Any amount of information can be zipped in a fraction of a second, to anywhere or multiple locations in Cyberspace, a space that encompasses a Borderless world. The information, dislocated from the rest of the world system, is on the run away. The fantastic speed of the information flow, is not matched by the rest of the system components, be it materials, human contacts, or any physical objects that cannot be transformed into bits and bytes. The unequal development of other operating systems in term of speed, as compared with information flow, is like aged grandparents trying to catch up with the energetic and fast running kids on a highways. It is not only the mere flow of data, but computer technology further processes the data into some meaningful information for further use, again at greater speed than ever imagined by the previous generation.

The speed gap of information flow and the materials flow is widening in an exponential manner. This has serious implication and consequences to the integrity of the total system, if we imagine the whole world as a tightly inter-linked, inter-connected and inter-dependent global village system. Like the earlier analogy of 50 times faster speed of blood circulation system of the human body, the interacting components are suffering massive dy-functioning, breakdown, or unexpected and uncontrolled behaviour. There are evidence of un-parallel and disturbing growth of operating systems. In the case of organisation (like business entity), the traditional role of middle managers who controlled, filtered and edited information for upper management, is made redundant, causing massive downsizing and confusion. The senior management is overwhelmed with information overload. They are as lost and confused also. Reengineering effort, sounds good in theory, is like modern experiments carried out in stone-age cage, with chaos and resentment and blind leading the blind endeavour The economic model, has not evolved to an appropriate maturity, as it still treats the whole engine of growth as mechanistic components. The offering at the altar for economic performance is money or profit made, as the ultimate measurement of human progress. The very economic model, an invention during the industrial age, is totally outdated in this information age, it fails to measure the harmony and integrity of the total system performance. In the case of political system, the politician still clink on to the traditional role of trying to be the spokesman of the people, although in reality it is the mass media that becomes the spokesman and people themselves wanting to have their own voice heard. Information, is no longer in the hand of the politician, but the mass media and the people.

The world attention on the ease and speed of information is more on intellectual property. Recognising the limitation of the existing intellectual protection mechanisms, new laws and legislation are devised Such initiative is still the carry over of the old doctrine of individualism : individual rights, regionalism, it is nothing close to global village community concept. This writer does not condemn individualism for its own sake, but does question the lack of creative mind to harness human intelligence for greater common good, besides individual rights.

As I turn to look at the present economic tremor in Asian, I begin to wonder how lightning speed information plays its part. Million and billion of money (in various currencies) is "transported" in Cyberspace with changing ownership, within split of an second. Without any physical good changing hands, the perceived value can change drastically, that is, the dramatic fluctuation of currency rates. As I try to imagine, if one-week food is considered consumed by our body within a split of a second, what happens to our digestive system, sensory system and body system.

Isn't information behaving like delinquency problem?

Of course, information or computer technology by themselves are neither good or bad, right or wrong. This reflection is not a debate for or against information technology. This is a call for human race to think deeply our own action, our incessant quest for speed without any balance with other aspect of human values like global community spirit, peace, harmony, brotherhood etc. This is an invitation to invoke higher level of human intelligence to pause before we act, to feel the imaginary damages and chaos that we may create collectively, yet un-intentionally, on our unquestionable quest for information speed.

End.