All the Networks and No Connections

It would seem the best place for terrorists to plan and work is in plain sight.  Those who intend to do harm need only shield themselves long enough to do the deed, apparently, from world experience.  Evidently it doesn’t take much to keep law enforcers at bay, either.

Reports out of Belgium, France, Turkey, and the U.S. all indicate that though we have information we just aren’t very good yet at connecting the dots.

Maybe it should be fewer dots and more like threads.

Hasn’t this long been the story, though?  Haven’t the doer-of-bad-deeds usually had the advantage of surprise throughout history?

We just know about the many bad actors and their crimes against so many individuals now, around the world, instantly and with vivid color and detailed reports.  Knowing this, however, doesn’t make it any less depressing, frustrating or sad.

 

Information Access for All

Among the more interesting aspects of the current election cycle is the constant fact checking that several of the news organizations now routinely provide after candidate debates.  Often these fact checks rely on public documents that the news organizations dug up in previous news cycles or were pressed to look up for the purposes of confirming the claims by candidates on the campaign trail.

This is a nice development that reinforces the idea that public information isn’t just for the gotcha moments featured in movies like Spotlight but are necessary to keep public conversations at least a little bit honest and close to the truth.

Yeah for our team’s work on making access so usual we don’t even notice it at work!

What if government were more like an IPod?

Dilbert’s creator, Scott Adams, posited in a November Wall Street Journal article that government should adopt more digital entry points for citizen participation.  He suggested that the ease of using an IPod was something for government to consider as a model of collecting the public conversation into a more accessible medium.

What it all made me wonder about, though, was could the IPod model actually capture our attention and point us to the important conversations that might be available?  It might make the conversations easy to acquire, but would we get the conversation?  Or would the important stuff get buried, so 15-seconds ago, like my email, search results and music selections that bob and weave with the interrupts of living at digital speed?

Can social networks really solve the problems of shallow thought and short attention?

Really,does any conversation in a chat room arrest our attention like a public notice advertisement with our name and address in it?

What were we saying?

Shed some light

From tnpress.com