I’m not overly concerned with managers but I am interested in trends and how they come to influence us. These quotes from an interview with Google’s chief economist are on the mark.
My attention is limited, I’m already spending a major amount of time sorting, sifting, grokking and only just starting to find my “voice” in visualization and presentation through the medium of blogging.
How different is the world now that we can access almost any data point?
“What is it that’s really scarce in the Internet economy?” And the answer is attention. [Psychologist] Herb Simon recognized this many years ago. He said, “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” So being able to capture someone’s attention at the right time is a very valuable asset.
The ability to take data—to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it—that’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades, not only at the professional level but even at the educational level for elementary school kids, for high school kids, for college kids. Because now we really do have essentially free and ubiquitous data. So the complimentary scarce factor is the ability to understand that data and extract value from it.
