Will Information Technology Outpace Our Capacity to Understand?

• Author: Wright, Raymond M.

Information technology is now developing a "new economy". It begs the question: how do we educate and develop our human resources to operate in a social learning cycle that involves abstraction, diffusion, absorption and impacting of knowledge? Further, will information technology outpace our capacity to understand?

Information technology allows us to do things that we are not already doing. It fosters innovation. It is about exploiting the latest technologies to achieve new goals. Recent history is replete with examples of failures to understand the benefits of new information technologies.

Initially, IBM in 1950 considered shortsightedly that the worldwide demand for data processing computers would be about 50 machines. Twenty years later, mainframe computer manufacturers considered the minicomputer a toy. In 1980, the personal computer received the same reception. Conventional wisdom was that needs were already being met by larger machines. As we know now, the virtue of personal computers did not lie in doing what larger machines already did, but in giving birth to entirely new kinds of applications.

Lack of inductive thinking about information technology is now a new problem. Thomas Edison, who invented the phonograph, once said he thought its value was in its capability to allow "dying gentlemen" to record their last wishes. Marconi, who developed the radio, regarded it a wireless telegraph that would operate point-to-point. He did not realize or recognize its potential as a broadcast medium.

We know now that the strength of the Xerox copier did not lie in replacing existing copying technologies, but in performing services beyond the reach of the existing technologies. Xerox copying is an extension of Say's Law. Jean Baptiste Say, a French economist, in 1820 observed that in many situations supply creates its own demand. Once people see that they can have something, they feel that they cannot live without it. This is strongly symptomatic of the information economy.

People are as developed as the information they can access. But the information technology age, particularly in respect to media events, tends to supply us with more information than we can easily digest. In any major event, such as the death of Diana Spencer or the impeachment of a United States President, old and new media technologies - including newsprint, radio, television and satellites - and the Internet move in, and these stories quickly become the equivalent of a...