When I see a face in a movie that looks familiar but I can't quite place, I go to imdb.com and find the actor in question, then trace back his or her career and typically read their bio as well. This happened recently when watching The Departed with my wife. The slightly implausible, too good-looking state counselor with an MD and a PhD turned out to have been...the archer in the short-lived Roar series. So I keep joking about how she is going to loose a quiver of arrows on her enemies throughout the remainder of the film. I got laughs initially and then had to shut up because I just couldn't let go.
And getting lost in Wikipedia still happens, cross-linking through historical treatises on the lives of scientists or the historical build-up to the Napoleonic Wars. Man, music theory on Wikipedia is amazingly dense; the maintainers of those pages are to be commended. Then there is LinkedIn for monitoring the status of friends and colleagues in the technology business. On the less savory side, I recently discovered a neighbor had a lien put on his house for failure to pay child support in 1993 while looking around the public records section of Santa Clara County. It fits. I never did like him. It seems I only really use Google for coding examples and occasional driving directions any more.
"The end of ambiguity" has a nice ring to it as we move forward into the 21st Century. Looking back, we were amazed at how little we knew or could confirm prior to the internet. We lived behind a veil of ignorance, safe in our cocoons of uncertainty. Conflicts emerged over factual matters that could easily be resolved had the right resources been accessible in a timely manner. Lessons learned were far too often not transmitted to the next generation of business, social and technology leadership, resulting in a massive waste of societal effort and brain power. It was not surprising that the impact of information technology on efficiency was either hard to measure or showed negative returns because technology had yet to provide the kinds of information access scales that lead to reduced ambiguity. Computers were just big calculators and filing cabinets before the internet.
Vannevar Bush's notion of Memex comes to mind. Even in 1945, Vannevar felt researchers were faced with an explosion of information and needed a "memory extender" that would use circuits and microfilm to connect together research papers and ongoing experiments in a given field. Vannevar wanted information discovery and linking, two things that the internet helps with. My own effort builds on the notion of enhanced discovery to support better personalization of information access. By improving personalization, we increase the rate of discovery, decrease ambiguity and, well, better target advertising to individual needs and interests.
Integration is key, though. Why can't I have gotten the bio and filmography of Vera Famiga from the directory on my DVR? Why can't I read about the history and conflicts of Northern California water policy as I browse through my local paper's discussion of watershed levels? Why can't I request a Wikipedia backgrounder from my car as I pause Sirius satellite radio during an NPR news article on the habitats of the Seychelles Islands? And why can't I rediscover those items later from a central collection with a bird's eye view of my own history?
The end of all ambiguity is likely impossible, but we are still doing an impressive job of lifting the veil of ignorance.
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