The information age is the era of professionalism. The term “professionalism” here does not refer to the specialization of different categories, but the comprehensive information processing and logic analysis capabilities. It is said that synthesis is creation, and this describes the information age very well. In this information age, the understanding and handling of things are in the details, but in how wide the usage can be. iPhone is nothing more than a handheld computer and mobile phone; both were already created more than a decade ago, yet in the hands of Steve Jobs, these two are integrated together, and become iPhone that everyone uses. In the information age, popularity is also a kind of “depth”, and this kind of "depth" is based on comprehensive creation.
In fact, if you are not a professional information analyst, the information age is harmful to you. It may be catastrophic, because the information you see may be toxic. Therefore, in the information age, unless you are an information analysis expert, it is better not to look at any information. If you have to look at it, you may get confused.
If you are a professional, you might be an engineer, a lawyer, an architect, a factory manager or a chief accountant, but you will be more and more aware that there is too much information to see, and chances are you will be confused. The sense of crisis then gets stronger, and this is actually a mental illness known as “net synthesis” in the information age.
Such things are not unheard of in the media. Some might have been working for a lifetime, and finally achieved financial freedom, yet their bank card information has been stolen, and the hard-earned money has lost just like that. You think this is impossible for others to know your password, yet everything including bank card password is open and tradable in the online world. There are too many of such incidents and the judicial system simply cannot care less. Much of these are known, just that some of us refuse to believe. When we chose to believe is what the banks told us; "the chip card is more secure than the magnetic stripe card", and we accept that as to be real.
If we want to search for something, generally ordinary people would find the information with tools like Google and Baidu. The same thing that the ordinary people spent 3 hours to look for, the information analysts use 5 minutes, and that makes it 36 times. If we convert this into workload, the ordinary people would spend 36 times more, and this has to do with the problem of efficiency.
In this information age and in this online world, there are many things that we would not know, but these are the things that make us stupid. The most frightening thing is that in the information age, we can only accept the conceptual summaries of others, and then we have no choice but follow that. When we buy stocks, we would look at the concept stocks; when we buy car, we would look the concept car. There is also a sharing economy, Big Data, and then there are the concept rocket and subway that Elon Musk thought about when he was smoking weed. There are concepts summed up by others everywhere, and then we blindly follow these concepts. It seems that in the information age, we suddenly find we need everything in urgency. Our life is dominated by such ubiquitous concepts, and we become completely involuntary. For this reason, we live like a fool in the information age.
So can those smartly-dressed experts in finance, currency, banking and stocks that we see on Wall Street, the professionals who babble statistics all day long in this information age be trusted? In actuality, they too live in information fragments and are surrounded by information explosion. What they can cope with are merely the work routines and common sense; they are almost identical to ordinary people except for their flashy business cards. If you ask a rocket scientist about stocks, his answer will be the same as in what you read on the newspapers; even if you ask a property agent whether the selling price of a house is reasonable, his answer will be limited to the concepts that he knows. As for those people who talk about statistics frequently, let us just say that in the Wall Street crisis of the 1930s, the first person who went bankrupt was the great mathematician Irving Fisher.
What matters is logic, understanding and interpretation, not statistics.
The work of the information analysts seems to be very simple; it is as if just piecing everything together to become a trend that can be defined. You see such fragments here and there, therefore they seem to be worthless. However, not many can do such a simple job. Many countries have spent hundreds of billions of dollars and have a group of information analysis experts at work because it is a job that requires professional training and teamwork, and it has a lot of works to be done. The simple truth is that, the same newspaper, the same sentence, the same article will have different results to different people. The leaders are talking repeatedly, but not many could understand the message.
In the information age, even smart people can make be quite confused. The reason is the fragmentation of information, and there is a lot of such information, particularly in social media when garbage information are produced and reproduced.
This kind of phenomenon only makes people completely at a loss. These information may look familiar, but are they authentic? What then, is the really important one? What are the logical relationships between the fragments? Which ones are not important at all, and which ones may kill you? There are a lot of such problems, which could drown one deep inside/ An analysis expert has said that the general idea is that in a 3,000-word article, about a maximum of more than 100 words would be valuable, yet the other two thousand words, that is more than 90% of the content is rubbish. How many rubbish have we read from start to finish? We spend more than 90% of our time on garbage and have wasted our time.
The University of Washing has even started a course on fake news, naming it “"Calling Bullshit in the Age of Big Data”. The “bullshit” in this course refers to the language, statistics, charts, and other presentations that openly disregard facts and logic; their purpose is to impress the audience. The information in this information age is like a beast that devours many who are at a loss, and this is worrisome.
Final analysis conclusion:
In the eyes of information analysis experts, 99% of the people are "ordinary people", and life in the information age has become extremely difficult to them. In the past, sending a child to kindergarten was a simple matter; yet choosing a kindergarten now has become a complicated project. This is even truer in the seeking medical advice, where you have to become a semi-medical expert. Therefore, for ordinary people, it may be better to make life easier by not seeing any information. Yet, if your work and career are inseparable from information, then try to check the information recommended by professional analysts; the value of the information is actually your time, future, and destiny.
