Cut off from the Internet during my 9-month stay in Malta, and having to research a paper about the evolving workplaces of a country thousands of miles away, I recently spent a significant amount of time lamenting how difficult it was for me to find information.
In order to get material for my paper, I had to <brace yourself> read books and spend time looking through the card catalogs in the library! Oh the pain, the horror! The agony of not being able to simply call up a search engine, type in a few words and press "send".
For those of you who use the internet frequently in your business, or for academic reasons, or just on an everyday basis, you probably know what I'm talking about. Searches engines like Google, and Yahoo!, online reference libraries like Encarta and Wikipedia, news websites like CNN and BBC, and the thesaurus function in Microsoft Word make information easily available with only a few clicks of the mouse.
Today, information is everywhere.
In the far, far distant past (in computer years), the best place to get information was at a local library. There, one could find the sum of all human knowledge.... or at least all human knowledge that could be found in that district, and that wasn't already checked out.
Then Google came along and suddenly "universal access" was available to people all over the world, to libraries all over the world. It is seachable in over 100 languages and Google CEO Erik Schmidt brags, "If you can type, you can use Google."
This availability of information is changing the workplace. In the past, workers needed to be highly specialized because they were responsible for knowing all the factors that affect their job and the things they were responsible for.
Now, we simply type a few words into a search engine, head to Wikipedia.com, or even go to Amazon to buy a ??? for Dummies book... which is shipped to our house in less than a week without anyone having to go anywhere near a bookstore or library. Information is no longer power... it has become a commodity.
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