More About Content, Experiences and Information
Here is a short follow-up on Henrik’s post "Back to Basics..."
Acknowledging that information and knowledge cannot be managed with technology is important. The main reason is that it allows us to put our focus and efforts on what we actually can manage with technology; how knowledge and information is encoded into various forms of content and how that content is then managed and delivered to the right user in an efficient way.
Why then even bother to make this separation between content and information, between what can exists in the outside world and what can exist only in the minds of humans? Well, because it will hopefully make the content creator - the sender of the message - more aware of that a content product can be misinterpreted and not understood in the correct way by individuals who come across and use it. Some individuals might think that the information that they are able to extract from a content product is incomplete and feel a need to get more detailed information. Others might think there is too much and irrelevant information in the same content product.
Content producers have come to realize that their content products need to be tailor-made for a specific audience, sometimes even for specific individuals. And that they are delivering experiences, not only satisfying rational needs. We are in fact moving from an era where physical products where mass-produced for the masses to satisfy "objective" and rational needs, to a new era where consumers expect to get great experiences when interacting with digital or physical products. And experiences are subjective and emotional, not objective and rational. To satisfy the expectations of their consumers, content producers simply must put more care in to how they create and deliver content. Technology cannot do this part for them.
Acknowledging that information and knowledge cannot be managed with technology is important. The main reason is that it allows us to put our focus and efforts on what we actually can manage with technology; how knowledge and information is encoded into various forms of content and how that content is then managed and delivered to the right user in an efficient way.
Why then even bother to make this separation between content and information, between what can exists in the outside world and what can exist only in the minds of humans? Well, because it will hopefully make the content creator - the sender of the message - more aware of that a content product can be misinterpreted and not understood in the correct way by individuals who come across and use it. Some individuals might think that the information that they are able to extract from a content product is incomplete and feel a need to get more detailed information. Others might think there is too much and irrelevant information in the same content product.
Content producers have come to realize that their content products need to be tailor-made for a specific audience, sometimes even for specific individuals. And that they are delivering experiences, not only satisfying rational needs. We are in fact moving from an era where physical products where mass-produced for the masses to satisfy "objective" and rational needs, to a new era where consumers expect to get great experiences when interacting with digital or physical products. And experiences are subjective and emotional, not objective and rational. To satisfy the expectations of their consumers, content producers simply must put more care in to how they create and deliver content. Technology cannot do this part for them.