Information and coherence

Try this experiment at home:

• Gather 163 books
• Rip out the pages - discard covers and bindings
• Pile pages on the floor of your drawing room
• Collect paper from your neighbours' paper bins
• Add to the pile
• Shuffle the pages into random order
• Read 30 pages a day
• Make sense of it

You might think this experiment is too stupid to contemplate, let alone do... and it is. On the other hand, it is what many 'knowledge workers' attempt each day: to find coherence - meaning even - from the e-mails they receive. Each one makes sense as a structured message, but taken as a whole, each one is the merely the next page of an incoherent, uncoordinated narrative. Page 148 of Austen's Emma precedes page 23 of Dante's Inferno, followed by page 71 of the instruction booklet for your calculator (printed in 12 languages and the page you picked up is literally foreign to you).

Framed as an experiment, it shows how ridiculous the venture is. 

Meaning or coherence doesn't come from more information or more data. It comes from your ability to keep your purpose 'front of mind' when you read the next page.

Sometimes this ability is called the 'helicopter view'.

Information technology helps not so much in what it does, but in as much as it enables you to juxtapose purpose alongside the next batch of data.