Scientific and technological development, the emergence of computing technology and the information society in recent years has greatly increased the speed of mankind's progress up the ladder of scientific progress. At the same time, this led to the emergence of new, previously unknown problems associated with modern technologies. One of them is characterized by the concept of "information explosion". This is a continuous increase in the amount of information published in the public domain throughout the world.
The role of scientific and technological progress
The high speed of scientific and technological development, the emergence of new research subjects, the increase in opportunities for obtaining new knowledge, the sharp modernization of old technologies - these are the factors that contributed to the growth of resources for information search. Meanwhile, they do not have an expiration date, but are characterized by the ability to endlessly accumulate and expand existing databases.data.
At the moment, the amount of information in the public domain has increased hundreds of times. The entire heritage of knowledge accumulated by mankind by the beginning of the 19th century doubled every fifty years, by the middle of the 20th century - every ten, and by the beginning of the 21st - already every five years.
Over time, the concepts of "information society" and "information explosion" appeared, characterizing new development trends.
Information Society
Humanity has gone through periods of revolutions, after which society reached a new level of development, received new characteristics. The first revolution occurred with the advent of writing, the second - with the beginning of the development of publishing, the third - with the invention of electricity, and the fourth - with the advent of computer technology. Each stage was characterized by an increase in the flow of incoming information.
With the advent of the Internet, it became possible to easily and quickly exchange data with people and organizations located throughout the globe. New methods of systematization and acquisition of knowledge have appeared, which has made them one of the main needs for a representative of society. All this greatly affected the development of society.
Today people are representatives of the information society. A feature of this stage of development is the use of knowledge in all processes and actions, as well as the automation of work performed. Changes affect the worldview of people:mental labor has become more common than physical labor, and informational needs have also been added to material needs. That is why the phenomenon of information explosion is typical for this type of society.
The lifestyle of modern people, in addition to advantages, has disadvantages. These include the high susceptibility of people to information stress, due to the receipt of a large amount of information in the human brain, as well as the influence of the media on the consciousness of individuals.
Emerging Factors
Information explosion is characterized by a sharp increase in the flow of information and knowledge into free access, which must be learned and processed for further work. Contributed to its appearance:
- a scientific revolution that made information processing one of the main labor processes;
- development of the publishing industry, which made it easy to disseminate the accumulated information;
- emergence of the media;
- spread of compulsory education, which increased the percentage of the literate population.
The consequences of the explosion
One of the main consequences of the information explosion can be called the emergence of an information crisis. This is the discrepancy between the possibilities of assimilation of knowledge by a person and their daily turnover. It becomes more and more difficult to understand the flow of information available to each individual.
There was a problem of information overload of schoolchildren and students. To avoid its development, it is necessarylook for ways to work safely and increase learning efficiency.
Information barriers
With the emergence of the information explosion problem, Russian academician Vladimir Glushkov developed a theory about information barriers. It shows discrepancies between people's requests and possible ways to implement them.
There are three such barriers.
The first is associated with the appearance of writing around the 5th millennium BC. Before that, information could only be stored in the human brain.
The second barrier appeared with the possibility of printing books in the 15th century AD, which greatly increased the number of information carriers. After that, other means of transferring knowledge were invented: the telegraph, television, magnetic cassettes, but their processing was still carried out by the human brain.
The third barrier is associated with the invention of electronic computers in the middle of the 20th century, when there was so much information that the human brain was not enough to process it. It was necessary to come up with a machine that would carry out this process automatically.
Thus, each of the barriers meant a new information explosion, thanks to which humanity moved forward on the path to progress, but at the same time acquired new problems.
Information problem
At the moment, we can say with confidence that the population of the Earth is growing exponentially, and the amount of renewable natural resources is increasing only in arithmetic. In the last century, scientists expected to solve this problem by introducing new technologies, as well as increasing the level of universal literacy and, as a result, reducing the birth rate.
At the moment, we can say that the demographic problem is not the leading one in developed countries. New technologies have been invented, thanks to which humanity is not threatened with extinction from hunger. But at the same time, a number of problems associated with the entry into a new era appeared. For example, information explosions, to eliminate which now also need to look for solutions.
Manifestations of this problem
The information crisis (explosion) has the following manifestations:
- The emergence of contradictions between a person's ability to process incoming information and the amount of data that is publicly available.
- Having a lot of information that is not necessary and makes it difficult to find useful knowledge.
- The emergence of political and social barriers that make it difficult for a person to access and disseminate existing information.
The role of an explosion for a person
The main problem of mankind, which has arisen due to the information explosion, is the inability to assimilate the flow of information accumulated throughout the history of the development of society. This is hindered by the capabilities of the brain, and biological age, and the technological development of all mankind. With each generation, more and more weight of knowledge accumulated by predecessors is imposed on its representatives.
All the amount of knowledge that used to be revealed to people for two or three centuries is currently translated into the brain in one week. Therefore, the speed of data perception increases several times, which carries a heavy burden on thinking. Thus, a person living in the 21st century must acquire and process a very large amount of information, hundreds of times more than his ancestor, who lived in the 15th-16th centuries.
People living in the 21st century, due to the abundance of available facts and knowledge, do not have time to read fundamental works in full. Most of them study them in a brief retelling, according to the plot of film adaptations, or even know about them only from encyclopedias. This is an expected fact due to the increase in the amount of information at the disposal of mankind.
If you put all the knowledge in the world in the brain of an individual, then he will probably go crazy from its volume. In addition, it is impossible to determine the reliability of all these data, since each author expresses his own opinion, which may differ from others.
Negative Consequences
Scientific and technological progress, on the one hand, has carried out a lot of useful processes for society, raised science to a new, previously unknown level. For example, the invention of lasers in the field of optics made it possible to make new discoveries in the field of history. There was an opportunity to study in more detail the ancient era, the dead languages and writing, the culture of past peoples. Thus, such a science as cultural studies arose and developed. InventionThe telescope made it possible to get an idea not only about our own planet, but also about the entire Universe. Thanks to the appearance of microcircuits in computers, the possibilities of storing and processing information have increased.
However, at the same time, the scientific revolution brought negative consequences. First of all, this is the emergence of information pollution, in which it has become difficult to determine the degree of usefulness of the information available. The phenomenon of the information explosion, which has become relevant in recent decades, has greatly influenced the worldview of people. Perhaps, over time, scientists will be able to find a way to deal with this process, but at the moment there is no effective way to solve the problem. And the search for a solution is an important activity for the sciences of various fields.
