21st. CENTURY TRENDS (1)

21st CENTURY TRENDS

It is approximated that the total amount of information worldwide doubles every 18 months. This figure applies to the technological and scientific realms, mass media, and other sources.

Data overflow can be overwhelming, and even disastrous without data "engineering". We have witnessed, for example, how bureaucracies bury themselves in massive, unneeded paperwork, and this process can be called redundancy. The other side of data redundancy is data starvation, and a corporation (and also a person, or a country) could suffer from either form of such systemic diseases. When it becomes overwhelming, information needs less to be tabulated, and more to be engineered, or interpreted, in order to enhance its value as knowledge.

The confederation of networks we call Internet seems to have two embryonic, almost miraculous qualities. As a system, it has the power to organize itself (and therefore its data content) without a central authority, but also expands rapidly like an enormous body of live cells.

Not even the forefathers of Internet, like Vinton Cerf, could predict exactly its course. As Nicholas Negroponte (director at M.I.T. Media Labs) describes, processes that double themselves every unit of time happen in the beginning very slowly, and therefore appear unnoticeable.

Robert Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet and founder of 3Com Corp., realized back in 1970 that the power of sharing machines on a network rises as the square of the total power of all machines attached to it. In other words, with every new computer attached to the Internet, the network's value and resources rise in an ever increasing spiral of power.

It is evident that the Web will become a major depository of knowledge. Its "self-organizing" quality can be already seen, although it is slow at this stage. Can we expect the Web, and other forms of interactive media to save us from the data invasion?

In his book Powershift (Bantam Books, 1990), Alvin Toffler contended that tomorrow's wealth will not be determined by one's acres of land, or ounces of gold, but by the quality and speed of one's information. The first trend we see for the next century is a gradual increase in the speed of data. Fast data and value-enhanced data will become conditions, and definite sources of wealth.

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