| We're told that we live in the Age of Information. This is true in one sense: people are producing more data than ever before. We have ultra-sophisticated data-processing tools and countless ways to exchange information. But for all the hoopla and all the billions spent on gadgetry, very few organizations make a genuine effort to ensure that the information they generate is quality information.
How do we define quality information?
If you happen to be a machine, quality information is information that you can read, ‘understand,’ use and reuse.
Human requirements are more subjective, but the principles are the same: we need information that we can read (or watch, as in a video, or listen to, as in an audio recording), understand, use and reuse.
As a rule, organizations are more careful about the information they feed into machines than they are about the information they feed to people. The reason is simple: most humans, unlike most machines, will not stop working if they receive garbled information. We are, in the language of machines, fault-tolerant.
Eventually, machines will become more fault-tolerant than we are. But both humans and machines will always have limits. Good communication practices acknowledge and respect these limits; they ensure that we can understand and use the information that is intended for us with a minimum of effort.
Does this mean we should ban text that demands too much of our intelligence? Absolutely not. There will always be a place for text that challenges us. But with so much text in this information-rich world of ours, we need literature that is as light and transparent as possible. |
