http://www.leilene.net Sat, 21 Aug 2010 03:15:52 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 http://www.leilene.net/alex-finds-wayne-gretzky-on-the-net/ http://www.leilene.net/alex-finds-wayne-gretzky-on-the-net/#comments Mon, 12 Oct 2009 07:53:32 +0000 admin http://www.leilene.net/?p=5 When 9-year-old hockey player Alex Tapscott and his teammate Stephen Senders needed to solve a debate about their hero Wayne Gretzky, they interrupted Alex’s dad to get access to the Net. Dad took a break from his Mac, and two minutes later the boys had found an NHL server in hawaii containing a spec sheet on Gretzky They printed it with a color photo of their hero and the debate was settled. They were both right. When Dad asked Alex why he went to a server in Hawaii, Alex replied:
“We just thought it was so amazing that they would have information about hockey in Hawaii that we wanted to check it out.” Alex and Stephen—Net surfers. The new technology is penetrating our lives; much of this is happening through our children. Over one-quarter of American homes have a computer, but for many adults the machine is a mystery, or it is used for word processing, accounting, or home business applications. Children, on the other hand, are using machines for games, homework, communications, art, music, reference, and a host of emerging applications on the Internet. The average age of an Internet user is twenty-one and declining.
Such communications capacity doesn’t mean an end to infojunk. When telegraph wires were first strung between Texas and Maine in the nineteenth century, writer Henry Thoreau wondered if the two states really had anything constructive to communicate. Maybe, Thoreau said, the telegraph system was nothing more than an “improved means to an unimproved end.” Thoreau isn’t the only writer to twit new ideas. Columnist Dave Barry has had similar fun with the information highway, wondering whether or not the whole thing isn’t just “CB radio with more typing.”
But already software “agents,” or “knowbots,” are in the marketplace. They go out onto the Net to find the information you want. Rather than drowning in data, agents will provide the structure to form data into information and the context into which to translate information into knowledge. When you apply your own human judgment and transhistorical insights, knowledge can become wisdom. Chances are the Net will enable us to move up this chain rather than down.

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