Is information overload derailing the human project?

Are the societies we have created so complex that we cannot effectively develop them? Have we stalled in a morass of information that is so vast that we no longer have the means to examine Information to make sound decisions?

I offer my "Information" hierarchy as; Data is everything that is captured in books, computers and any other recorded form that can be accessed. Information is Data that is grouped by context and relevance to a specific topics, and Knowledge is Information used to create actions.

A bit like a cake recipe. Trawling "Data" gets us to the ingredients which are "Information", but the "Knowledge" is in cooking instructions that convert the mixed ingredients into a finished cake.

So just how much Information do societies have to deal with and what are we able to convert to sound Knowledge?

During my years in corporate I mostly used a hybrid model to analyze very large and complex company structures. This model reduced all human activity down to the lowest common denominators into which all human activity exists.

These are the six domains of Social, Political, Economic, Religious, Ecological and Scientific issues. (S.P.E.R.E.S factors). It is these six categories into which all human development, knowledge and skills can be subdivided. Grossly over simplified of course, but necessary for provisional analysis.

Each domain is a pyramid, the further down each pyramid the interrogation progresses, the more the volume and complexity of information and the more the issues. More critical still is the fact that each pyramid overlaps other domains as the pyramid broadens towards its base. This adds complexity because it creates cross dependencies with entities from ostensibly non related Information pyramids.

By way of example, a large multi-national corporation with 125,000 employees, operating in 35 countries and gross sales of $$35bn would naturally be complex. At a strategic level, top of the pyramid, only some thirty or so entities would be monitored as primary indicators at executive levels. These might include mission, goals, products, services, regulators, financials and so on.

The next layer down might include departmental entities such as marketing, logistics, HR, production for example, these might well run to many hundreds. At the lower levels of operational and asset management we could be looking at millions of entities.

Now extend this to 330 nations, millions of companies, 7 billion humans, tens of thousands of government departments and agencies of every description, infinitely variable social services, complex and rapidly changing geopolitical scenarios, accelerating scientific and engineering progress, thousands of NGO's, disparate economies, environmental impacts and over 30,000 religions.

More alarming still is the fact each of these domains has spewed a staggering range of "rules" onto society. Humans face an ever growing range of rule based restrictions on what we may or may not do along with penalties for non-compliance. The "rules" with which we are expected to comply across all domains are orders of magnitude greater than even the entities within each domain.

It would be no surprise if humans are failing to effectively assimilate information related to all these entities. It would also be miraculous if anyone could avoid garbage in- garbage out syndrome in decision making. One has to wonder just how effectively our societies are being "managed".

It could fairly be said that many of these national entities function within their own separate but not isolated domains, rather like large corporations do however, globalization is binding our disparate societies through trade, migration, economics, sciences, legal and political allegiances.

At the very least if not binding, we are creating cross dependencies between the other domains across nations, industries, societies and treaties.

If this level of complexity is only partly true, then the management of our societies is facing the rapid assimilation of multiple and constantly changing information entities on a monumental scale, and not converting much into Knowledge. We are not producing the right "cakes"(solutions).

Computers offer little to ease this burden. As we grow networking and increase the power of servers, we still define the decisions we hand to computers as algorithms and modeling. But we forget that these developed by humans who are trying to "describe" our human issues to a computer.

Algorithms simply freeze a certain set of decision criteria in time and we all know what happens when the parameters go beyond the algorithm, the computers and often the networks crash, alternatively and far more dangerous, they come up with the wrong answer.

Our species has developed many skills in communications (grunts to satellites), travel (reed boats to space ships) not to mention science, medicine, technology, arts and social development.

At the same time we see millions of humans die each year through the simple lack of food and water. The difference between our achievements at the top end of the spectrum and our under achievements at the bottom end is perhaps a measure of our failure to convert Information into the Knowledge of solutions.

The volume of unresolved issues within every society and globally is monumental. Is this because we are failing to cope, are we living in information silo's in order to avoid being swamped?

This is a global phenomenon, but it is bound to impact individuals, causing distress, confusion and the feeling of being disenfranchised. Could this be one of the key drivers of what has been described as our toxic society? Could this explain why some who are information rich can take legal and illegal advantage of others?

Each group, society and nation seeks to lay blame on our various leaders, perhaps we fail to acknowledge the possibility they are just as confused and consequentially just as dysfunctional as the rest of us.

We no longer understand why we are uneasy with our world and leap to simplistic solutions. We are adopting ever more radical mantra's to distance ourselves from the pain of not knowing how the world is really working.

Individual energy in all societies is increasingly focused on survival, disseminating so much information is just too hard. As a means of dealing with this we are increasingly adopting a "position" on various key issues and sticking with them to defend against the Information deluge.

In order to "defend" these positions we rely on self referential networks to supply a constant stream of affirmation. This has become polarizing, vexatious and divisive within our communities as these adopted perspectives clash.

If any one element of human distress is more global, uniform, obvious and consistent, it has to be the struggle to assimilate Information and its conversion into useful Knowledge, either for self preservation or for the benefit of all humans.