Writing my paper on ICT and sustainable construction last week, I would have liked a quotation I found in Monday’s Guardian newspaper, where the Media section was edited by guest editor Vint Cerf, ‘architect of the internet’. Cerf asked several influential internet gurus to “Tell me the future” and Peter Norvig, director of research at Google wrote:
Yale librarian Rutherford Rogers said “We’re drowning in information and starving for knowledge.” The internet is an ocean of information and in the near future we’ll speed through it effortlessly and intuitively, like a tuna.
The Rogers quote neatly summarises the issue we often face, I think (the tuna analogy – see the full article – is a little more complex but equally rewarding), and is even more remarkable when you consider that he said this to a New York Times reporter in 1985 and was referring to the increasing numbers of books published each year. Two decades later, his words resonate even more loudly in the internet context.
