Nature - Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything - page 7

Figure 1-4. Websites are part of organizational ecosystems.
But that's not enough. We should set our sights higher. Life is too short to focus solely on getting
better at business. Society as a whole suffers from bad decisions and anxiety caused by misin-
formation, disinformation, filter failure, and information illiteracy. We can't expect technology
to save the day.
While the Internet has delivered great change to consumers and industries, it hasn't made as
much progress in education, healthcare, and government. And we've begun to learn the cost of
free. In recent years, we've begun to lose newspapers, bookstores, libraries, and privacy. Now
we search for answers in a sea of advertisements, thinking carefully (or not) about where to
look, who to trust, and what to believe.
These are wicked problems but not impossible. No field has all the answers, but together we can
do better. That's why I'm writing outside my category about the nature of information in sys-
tems. It's not all about information architecture, and I'm a long way from library school. But this
inquiry is important. Connectedness has consequences. Information changes everything. That's
why I'm willing to travel.
Systems Thinking
I'm in Silicon Valley. I'm in a cab headed to my hotel. Actually, that's not true. I'm hitchhiking
and plan to sleep with a stranger named Sophie. Okay, that's not quite right either. But that's
how our eleven year old daughter explained my experiment with Uber and Airbnb to my wife.