Reflecting on Peter Nicholson’s essay “Information-rich and attention-poor”

In last Saturday’s Globe & Mail (Septemer 12, 2009), Peter Nicholson wrote on the implications of how information rich our society has become. As President of the Council of Canadian Academies, Nicholas comes to the debate from an academic position. Unfortunately, there was not much in the way of examples or data from an educational or research context in the essay.

Much of the essay reuses familiar examples and confuses the significance of rise of amateur production on the Web. Several of the examples and points made in the pice have been covered elsewhere and in greater detail. The claim that the Web’s “cult of the amateur” is killing expertise strikes me as odd. ‘Amateur’ production on the Web is often of different category than professional production. I would very much disagree that the “market for depth is narrowing.” Indeed, one could argue that there are now many more depths – or niches – than before.  The market for depth is broadening and deepening by many measures. For example, how many types of medical research are there now compared to 1980? Further, given the costs of doing accurate, high quality, ethical research, I doubt that “amateurs” are likely to take that over soon.

Nicholson does make a good point on the economics of this information transformation. As he writes, “But economics teaches that the counterpart of every new abundance is a new scarcity – in this case, the scarcity of human time and attention.” Librarians and other information professionals are poised to take advantage of this scarcity. Navigating through information and managing the information we already have remains critical.

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