The Quality of Information and What We do with IT

I started my search using the Texas A&M Library as my main aid in finding a scholarly article to write about. I then searched the terms Information and Quality, after retrieving over a few hundred articles I then went through the ones that were related to my field of study the most. Then I searched through the Full Text tab to find whether or not it was a scholarly article or just some journal entry.
The article I choose was “Impact of information quality and decision-maker quality on decision quality: A theoretical model of simulation analysis”. The article is about how information technology (IT) is represented when talking about information quality and the decision making that comes as a result of it all. It says how the quality of decisions improves with higher information quality being that the person making the decision is knowledgeable. But if not then the reverse will happen and the will make a lesser decision with the increase of quality.
This is something that we bother with constantly and affects us in everything we do daily. We as a people make snap judgments on a subject that we don’t really know anything about, just received a brief summary of the topic. That makes for a very uneasy reassurance in peoples decisions on a day to day operations, based on they don’t know much about what they are saying.

Escaping Information Overload

            People in today’s world have a constant overload of information that they must sort through, prioritize, and then decide which to do first and so on.  This is the way of the world and for the moment and the foreseeable future it is not going to change. 

            It does however make you start to wonder what would happen to people if they didn’t have all that information to look at.  Most people have been doing it for so long that they would go insane from not doing it.

            Today, all I did was ride around with my grandfather and talk about the past and the timeline of my family history with him.  That was it, and it felt so good just to do almost nothing and not worry with the million things that I had due tonight.  But as time has shown I had to resort to juggling a million things and creating much more stress in my life. 

            This concept is not thought of by many because we are taught from an early childhood that if you aren’t doing something productive then you shouldn’t do it at all.  I believe that every needs to unwind and relax because if you don’t, then you will end up actually insane then just having a case of temporary insanity.

            So here is my challenge for you, stop everything at least once a month or even once a week, just go drive and don’t answer your phone or even look at it.  Leave it at home and just go anywhere from a park, lake, or somewhere where there are no people and just be you.

The Quality We Leave Behind

            When writing a research paper, gathering information for court, or even just doing something for your family; you must always be weary of the information you get.  It seem like you have to do more research into your information to see if it is quality information or if it’s just fabricated.

            I am doing research into my family lineage right now, but around every corner, every person, and every page of information there is another twenty pages of information that I have to look at and ensure that it is from a legitimate source and that everything matches up with each record.  Most of the information I am looking at is from a legitimate source, but there are a few times that I have to cross check the information against three or four different records.  So were it only should have took me a few hours to complete this assignment, its taking a few days of staring endlessly at a computer screen.

            This makes for an interesting topic on that subject; just because it’s something we do now and don’t even realize how we do it.  We leave our digital marker online every day and in a multitude of ways.  Maybe we ought to rethink a lot of this because as I am doing research I am finding that just one written record is all I can find usually about a single person, or if it is more than one pieces its two; makes it hard to do accurate research with so many holes. 

            So, with all these missing files, burnt records, or incomplete documents; we should look not at the quality of what they did one hundred years ago, but how we should learn from their example and improve on it.  This will be the only way that our information of the present can better inform the people of the future.

Welcome to the Jungle!!!

In today’s world of retail, every store created is designed in a way to do nothing but make you spend more time in the store, thereby, causing you the consumer to spend more money.

            The article I choose was one from the Time, called Time Ideas (Essential Insights, Great Debates, Informed Opinions), and it was about how one man’s journey led him to the fact of how research is conducted to make the consumer slow down and buy things that they are not there to buy. 

            Using the Toulmin Analysis, to analyze this argument, first we have to identify the claim that was presented by the author or the article.  The claim is this, with the global economy down, people are spending less money and trying to save every penny; the retailer is applying every kind of scientific and psychological technique to make the consumer spend money on things they don’t need while in their store. 

            The data or the proof of this claim is noted very clearly by the author in his article.  He was able to see firsthand at a research facility where people stare at monitors and watch the consumers go down aisles in a supermarket that are designed for research. They test on everything from the tiles on the floor to the size of the shopping cart that is used to buy groceries.  Then show the percentages of how each had an effect to the consumers shopping style and time spent in the store.

            The warrant to this is that, most all people must go to the grocery store to live.  We as a people cannot live without food, so we must go to a place that supplies food so that we can live and our family as well.  The retailers know this, and must prey on your survival instincts to buy food for you and your family, so they present ways to keep you in the store as long as possible so that you will spend money.

http://ideas.time.com/2011/10/21/what-your-supermarket-knows-about-you/?iid=op-main-lede&hpt=hp_t2

Information We've Learned & How It's Overloaded

            The older we get as a person, the more information we learn, therefore, the more information we are trying to store and hopefully later recall.  But in today’s world of information, the information changes daily and by the time we learn one piece of information; it is replaced with five different types.  We never really forget the first piece of information that we learned, we just store it and learn more. 

            I am a gamer; my first video games were the arcade games, Super Mario Bros. and Centipede.  I grew up with them, for only a little while until my parents let me play their Atari game system.  In 1986 my parents bought a Nintendo Entertainment System, I was 6 and I played it every waking moment I was aloud too.  I learned how to play ever system that was introduced from Atari to the now PS3’s, Xbox 360’s, and Computer’s.  If ask to go back and play one of the older systems I can with very little trouble, while remembering all the games that I played when I was playing those systems.  This was my life of being a kid, and I loved every minute of it.

            My mind is so overloaded with the information of playing those games and how to play them.  I can recall almost every piece of information of those games with disturbing accuracy.  But once you learn that information, your life is now ruled by it.  I think of how this situation would make a great game, or fantasize about being characters in the game and what I would do in that situation.  That is the result of holding so much information of a specific type in for so long.  My life is ruled by those games and the overload of that information does affect my life and while it is constantly trying to force itself out, I am using more brain function trying to keep it hidden from others grasps. 

            So while we learn more information, our information doesn’t leave it simply gets stored and stored until we get so much of it in us that we can’t tell the information apart and can’t keep it from ruling our lives.

whAt thE eFfeCt Of InFOrmAtioN OVERload IS haVIng

            Today I will compare two different people’s outlook on what Information Overload is and what we are doing about it as a society.  Using a blog from the Harvard Business Review and a blog from ARMA Information Overload, I will compare how each says that we as a society take in the information and horde it to ourselves, constantly trying to stockpile it.

            In the blog from the Harvard Business Review, they show how this is not something new to humans to do, being that it’s been going on since print was first introduced.  They use Logos by explaining details in how society has been collecting books and written text throughout the ages and has only grown as time has gone by.  They show how libraries are some of the biggest of these collectors, not to mention private libraries at people’s houses.  How we have volumes of different books and magazines just stacked up on a shelf collecting dust in the hope of one day maybe reading it again.

            The blog from the ARMA also uses Logos to support their claims but also describes it to persuade the audience with mental images, so bring out Pathos in its argument.  It describes how in today world of online data is sharing, how people will just keep saving information on their computers and back up disk just in case they need it again.  They explain how file storages have become unmanageable and how everything has to be saved and stored, not just the important things but all things.

            These concepts of using Logos mainly to explain how Information Overload happens and has happened throughout our history helps us to understand it better.  But in each blog they use Logos in different ways to portray different ideas about the same idea.

Learning How to Read the 1's and 0's of Your Daily Life

        Today’s world of letters and symbols that make up the languages we communicate with in our everyday lives.  Most of the Digital Natives today know what everyone is and every acronym made up.  But they have failed in learning the most important of all the languages ever put on a computer.  The:

00010

01001

01110

00001

10010

11001

00000

00011

01111

00100

00101

is what represents all those letters and symbols that we use so much.  Every letter in the alphabet can be represented with the correct combination of “1 and 0”. 

            We as a society use this concept every day in almost every aspect of our lives.  We surf the web, talk on the phone, and share digital media.  We do this all day long; even in a class where we are suppose to be paying attention to the teacher.  The ease of use that computers and cell phones have made communicating from one person to another person has been felt in all classrooms around the world.  Students have out their computer and claim to be taking notes but soon as the teacher goes away they switch pages and pull up games, live chats, or other forms of distractions. 

            To learn how to use a computer or cell phone does not take a whole lot of effort, my 3 year old nephew knows how to work my sister’s cell phone and computer better than most.  But where all of us have failed is learning how they work, their communications.  We as a society have been brought up in a world where everything is just a mouse click away.  This mouse click though has a lot of secondary task assigned to it that the user never will see.  Every time you click your mouse and open a new screen, you are telling the computer to access its memory and open a certain file.  This is millions and millions more of 1’s and 0’s arranged perfectly to perform a specific task.  This allows us to communicate our ideas to the world, a simple arrangement of numbers, which only a few have learned.

            The question I have is this, if you had to type everything you said out with the numbers 1 and 0, would you still communicate as much as you do now?  Would people leave their computers for a pen and piece of paper?  How long would it take for people to learn and respect their computers for all of what they do and not just call it junk?