Don’t command. Search

“Don’t command. Search” In this simple instruction on how to use Gmail, Google’s email service, a new philosophy of knowledge for us, digital immigrants, is condensed. It is a way of learning and processing information so different from what we have seen that it is taking us a little getting used to. And we were educated to keep the data in physical and mental folders.

We were taught that we had to organize it, file it and memorize everything: the rivers, the Gothic kings and the economic reports of previous years. It was the only way we had to recover that information later.

Today things have changed. Watching my son Carlos, the digital native I have at home and from whom I always try to learn, I have realized that he does not feel any need to order and store information. He makes no effort to memorize it. He only needs to know where it is. The moment he needs it, he will access the knowledge “just in time”. The logic he uses is overwhelming: currently, knowledge is so fleeting that what was true a few months ago is no longer true today. Almost every moment new data, research and discoveries emerge that leave previous information outdated. That is why it only makes sense to recover that information at the precise moment of use.

This new situation has been influenced by two powerful circumstances:

The exponential growth of knowledge

In the third century BC, Aristotle instituted a system according to which the earth was the immobile center of the universe and, around it, the sun revolved with other planets. This theory lasted until Copernicus, in the sixteenth century, changed the paradigm and placed the sun at the center of the universe. It took no less than 18 centuries for the change to take place! Knowledge advanced at an extraordinarily slow pace. It took hundreds of years to change one’s point of view or conception of something. Under these conditions, it was worthwhile to memorize a “truth” that did not mutate. On the other hand, today we live in exponential times. There are about 3,000 million Google searches every month. The number of text messages sent per day exceeds the entire population of the planet. More than 3,000 new books are published daily. Technical information, for example, doubles every 2 days. This means that half of what students study in a technical degree during the first year will be out of date in the third. And this is just the beginning. It is expected that, in 2010, this technical information will double every 72 hours. In other words, in just 3 days this information will have lost its validity. What conclusion can we draw? That it makes no sense to memorize information: first, because data grows exponentially, and it is impossible to internalize it; and second, because information changes and is updated so quickly that, in a very short time, it loses value. It is no longer true. It is no longer useful.

The cost of storing the information is close to 0

In the same third century BC the Library of Alexandria, at the time the largest in the world, is believed to have housed about a million copies. Its employees, apart from organizing the books, made copies by hand of the original volumes, and sent emissaries to find new information in all cultures and in all the known languages of the ancient world, an undoubtedly colossal undertaking for the media of the time. Well, the information contained in that million copies today would fit in a few storage units within the reach of almost any organization. The advance of technology has meant that the cost of digital storage today is very close to 0. Every year, even every month, the capacity increases and the price of the media decreases. So much so that some, such as Google, Myspace or YouTube, offer the user almost unlimited space to store their emails, photos or videos for free. You don’t even need to do without old information. There is enough space to store everything. Within this new logic, it makes no sense to order or memorize information. A simple search is enough to find, instantly, what we need. Our children have already realized it. We have to make an effort to discover it.